Do certain impairments affect other abilities/senses, e.g. does blindness lead to enhanced hearing, do they just get better because the brain is less busy with other stuff?
In: Biology
There’s a concept called neuroplasticity. It means that your brain (neuro-) is flexible (-plasticity), to a degree. So the brain of someone who’s lost one sense may try to retrain itself to provide additional resources to the other senses. It may “rewire” itself so that the eyesight part of the brain of a now-blind person will tap into hearing and do some “processing” there.
The amount that this can happen isn’t predictable, but it’s been observed to happen, usually through brain scans of the affected people.
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