By early childhood, the sight regions of a blind person’s brain respond to sound, especially spoken language, new research shows.
The results, which appear this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest a young, developing brain has a striking capacity for functional adaptation.
“The traditional view is that cortical function is rigidly constrained by evolution. We found in childhood, the human cortex is remarkably flexible,” said Johns Hopkins University cognitive neuroscientist Marina Bedny, who conducted the research while at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And experience has a much bigger role in shaping the brain than we thought.”
