Dr. David Eagleman

So it turns out, you know, right, people who are born blind, what we call the visual cortex in the back of the head here,

That gets taken over.

It's no longer visual.

It becomes devoted to hearing, to touch, to memory, things like this.

And you can demonstrate that people who are born blind are better at hearing and at touch and so on.

They can discriminate things much more finely.

Same with people who go deaf.

The auditory cortex, all that real estate, nothing lies fallow in the brain.

All that gets taken over for different tasks and they can do things like see your accent, you know, just by lip reading, they can tell where in the country you're from and so on.

All of this demonstrates that, first of all, the more real estate you have, the better.

We are, in a sense, if you've got all your senses, you have to share everything.

And so we're pretty good at vision and hearing and touch and so on, but everything has to get shared.

But there are pretty extraordinary things that happen when people devote more real estate towards one task.

And by the way, just as a side note,

This is one hypothesis about what goes on with savantism in autism is that somebody, for whatever genetic set of reasons, ends up devoting a ton of real estate to, let's say, the Rubik's Cube or the piano or memorizing visual scenes or something, and then they are absolutely superhuman at it.

That comes at the cost of other things, let's say social skills that might be needed.

But the general story is if you devote a lot of real estate towards something, you're going to get really good at it.

So this is really interesting because first of all, take somebody like the Williams sisters,

They got drilled on tennis from day one.

And this stuff can be taught.