(January 21, 2023 at 6:16 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(January 21, 2023 at 4:30 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: blindsight was introduced to modern medical science by police detectives who felt they had good reason to believe some people who use medicalily certified blindness as alibi were, in fact, not blind, because they were observed to be able to walk along obstacle laden path without a walking cane
Someone once asked the late, great Ray Charles how he was able to get about with no cane. His answer was hard-soled shoes. He was able to hear echoes from obstacles, provided he was walking on a hard floor.
Boru
Science has known since the 1700s that many blind people who navigate by tapping their canes were listening for echos from obstacles, not feeling physically for obstacles.
Interestingly, MRI show that in blind people who developing the echolocation skills, the processing of audio input for echolocation occurs in the part of the brain where vision is normally processed, not where hearing is normally processed. This is just just one example of how flexibly the human brain can repurpose unused parts of itself to fulfill novel processing needs when such need arises.