A recent article in the Science Section of the NY Times described using MRI (or some other technology) to analyze the brains of blind & deaf people. The MRI data indicated that blind people had large amounts of neural activity in the visual cortex. Id est: They were making a lot of use of the parts of the brain used by sighted people to process visual input. The article strongly supports a notion I had circa 50 years age when I played Go with a blind electronics expert (I think his name was Dr. Benfy). I came to the conclusion that blind people have neither superior hearing nor superior tactile senses. They develop surprising abilities by using the visual cortex to process auditory & tactile input data. This allows them to build a reasonably accurate model of the world which approximates the model sighted people develop. For those not familiar with the game of Go. It is considered by many to be more difficult than chess. To the best of my knowledge, none of the world class Go players are able to play at a high level when blind folded. Many (some?) world class masters play at a high level when blind folded. GO is played on the intersections of an 18 by 18 board (361 places to put a piece). The board is empty when the game starts. Players alternate putting a piece on the board. The there is one kind of piece. The game can be thought of as two generals deploying armies of foot soldiers. When a lot of moves have been made, there are several battles being fought: Each is an attempt to gain & maintain control of an area of the board. At each move, a player must choose to make a move favoring one battle, ignoring the other battles until the next move. Dr. Benfy was one of the best non-oriental players at the time. I was a mediocre player & he beat me easily when playing even & usually beat me when he started me off with an advantage (I was allowed to put 5-10 or more pieces on the board before the game started). For his benefit, the pieces were golf tees instead of little small circular Stones. The black pieces had been filed to be convex, while the white pieces were ordinary concave golf tees. A hole was drilled in the board at each place that a piece could be placed. As we played, I became aware that when it was his turn to play, he moved his hands over the board feeling the pieces. The pattern of his hand motions seemed very similar to the visual patterns I used to scan the board while planning my moves. First scan the pieces in the vicinity of opponents last move. Next scan pieces in other areas of the board. Sometimes re-scan the area of opponents last move between scans of other areas. It seemed to me that he was building the same type of internal image of the board that I built using my visual system. Comparison of the vicinity of the opponents last move with other areas is necessary to decide whether to strengthen your army in the area of opponents last move or use your current move to further the fight in another area.
Not surprisingly, human echolocation also seems to recruit visual areas of the brain. I remember an old news story about Ben Underwood, wherein the reporter interviewing him was astonished to note that he could sort and identify the different vehicles as they passed by them in a parking lot, using only his clicking sounds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation
I've seen that interview, C C, it's uncanny. Dinosaur, here's a related story in the reverse, in which destruction of part of the visual cortex due to stroke, leaving the eyes healthy, gave the blind man the unconscious ability to avoid walking into obstacles. It's explained in the manner of reflex (such as blinking) but in this case his lower brain "sees" through the peripheral vision pathway. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...-blind-man-who-can-see-obstacles-2090303.html
