It is believed that blind people have better hearing than the sighted people. We checked whether this is confirmed by medical data and scientific research.
The question is, whether the blind people really hear better than the sighted, many worries many. Journalists asked them Channel One, BBC and others Russian And foreign Media. Such information is found at Scientific and popular And medical resources. It is posted by sellers on the websites of online stores for people with problems vision And Hearing. Internet users ask about this questions And answers.
People who were born blind or lost vision throughout their lives, indeed sometimes react to sounds better than those who work all five senses and get more useful information from them. However, this is not due to the development of any superpowers. People Hear Thanks to the reaction to the sound vibrations of the so -called hair cells located in the ear. Cells process the resulting vibration into an electrical signal transmitted to the brain. These hair cells are formed in the womb, do not grow throughout life, and if they die, they no longer recover. Thus, if a person has lost his vision, he cannot acquire a more acute hearing than the one with whom he was born. That is, his ability to capture sounds will not improve.
Nevertheless, back in 2015, it was scientifically proventhat blind people can be found better than sight, for example, a sound source. And a year earlier, scientists found outthat the areas of the brain that are responsible for vision are actively working for blind people, and precisely when they try to get an idea of the appearance of any object or its location, that is, in fact, they need visual information. How is it possible?
The fact is that different zones of the brain are responsible for processing signals from different senses. And if one of the feelings is lost, the brain can rebuild and use the unused area for processing signals from those organs that still act. That is, if a person loses vision, the brain is able to “give” the area that was responsible for him, under the processing of sound information. At the same time, scientists note: despite the fact that the brain is capable of such a reorganization throughout life, it is in childhood, when it is still developing, such changes can pass easily and fastest. This is due to the fact that in early childhood the brain, in fact, does not even need to be specially rebuilt. It initially adapts to the given circumstances, and does not change the already established system, as is the case in such cases in adults.
To confirm this hypothesis, biologists conducted experiment. They asked for three groups of subjects: completely sighted, blinded at an early age and those who lost their eyesight, being an adult, to evaluate sound tones and determine which one is higher. The best results in all cases were shown by a group of people who lost their vision in childhood or born with blindness.
Therefore, it can be argued that the effect of a more perfect hearing is the most expressed In people with innate blindness and those who have lost their eyesight at a very early age. The same, by the way, applies tactile Perceptions: the earlier a person is blinded, the easier and faster the brain “replace” vision with touch.
In addition, often blind people master Echolocation - The ability to move sound waves to understand where this or that object is located, and navigate in space. For bats and dolphins, for example, this is an innate skill that they need for survival, but people can also master it. By making various sounds, such as clicks with a tongue, a person can understand where he is, whether there are obstacles to him and how far they are. Moreover, with a certain perseverance, an echolocation can also learn a sighted one, but for blind people it will turn out to be easier and better. Proventhat the visual cortex of the brain reacts to the information obtained using echolocation, almost the same as the visual images of the sighted, that is, can largely replace vision. Those who see normally, it will be more difficult to learn echolocation, since the brain will need to allocate additional resources for this, while blind people have poorly involved visual centers that can reorient on the processing of echo -colocation data.
In 2019, a group of scientists during research She conducted several functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI). In this experiment, nine blind people and a control group of people without vision problems took part in this experiment. At the same time, biologists did not pay attention to how quickly the brain reacts or what its areas are involved, but aimedly studied the auditory bark of blind and sighted people and compared its reaction to subtle differences in sound data. As a result, they found outthat due to loss of vision, not only the visual cortex of the brain undergoes changes and adapts to obtaining information from other sources, the auditory bark also changes. Since blind people rely more by ear than the sighted, they, in fact, train it and those areas of the brain that are responsible for it. Scientists came to the conclusion that people with congenital blindness and those who blind at an early age better perceive subtle differences in sound information than people with normal vision, which these data are not so important.
On the left in the picture above warm colors mean areas of the brain that react better to low tones, and cold to high ones. On the right, the results of the study are shown, according to which blind people better distinguish between the features and shades of each sound than the sighted. It is worth noting that all the blind people who participated in the experiment lost their eyesight either at a very early age, or did not have it at all. It is not known whether these results will be fair for people who are blinded, being adults.
Another study, carried out by the same authors, helped to find out that blind people better perceive information about moving sources of sounds. FMRT showed that the brain of the sighted almost does not respond to the fact that the sounds are in motion, while blind people perfectly perceive this information by ear - their neurons react to it. Moreover, two people who were blind until adulthood took part in this experiment, and then the doctors were able to restore their vision with the help of surgery. And they also reacted to the movement of sounds. That is, in childhood, neural ties that are responsible for this have already been formed in their brain, so acquired vision does not prevent them from perceiving sound information.
Thus, blind people do not hear better (the ability to hear congenital and can not improve throughout life), but they perceive and interpret the resulting sound information much better. Hence the opinion that if one of the senses is absent, the rest are aggravated.
Photo on the cover: "Service", dir. F. Abraham, S. Sergik, scenes. S. Li, B. Everett, D. Goddard, muses. D. Pesano, 2015
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