Dr. David Berson

It's just it's unused by the nervous system and that would be a pity but it turns out that it is in fact used.

And the case that you're talking about is of a woman who was blind from very early in her life and who had risen through the ranks to a very high level executive secretarial position in a major corporation.

And she was extremely good at Braille reading and she had a Braille typewriter and that's how everything was done.

And apparently she had a stroke and was discovered at work, collapsed and they brought her to the hospital.

And apparently the neurologist who saw her when she finally came to said, you know, I've got good news and bad news.

Bad news is you've had a stroke.

The good news is that it was in an area of your brain you're not even using.

It's your visual cortex.

And I know you're blind from birth, so there shouldn't be any issue here.

The problem was she lost her ability to read Braille.

So what appears to have been the case, and this has been confirmed in other ways by imaging experiments in humans, is that in people who are blind from very early in birth, the visual cortex gets repurposed as a center for processing tactile information.

And especially if you train to be a good braille reader, you're actually reallocating somehow that real estate experience.

to your fingertips, a part of the cortex that should be listening to the eyes.

So that's an extreme level of plasticity, but what it shows is the visual cortex is kind of a general purpose processing machine.

It's good at spatial,

and the skin of your fingers is just another spatial sense and deprived of any other input.

The brain seems smart enough, if you want to put it that way, to rewire itself, to use that real estate for something useful.

In this case, reading braille.

At least in that case, tragic.

Right.