Ray Charles Effect: Cortical plasticity for music in the blind
A new study in February’s PLoS Biology suggests that some blind people have better auditory abilities and that, in the blind, the visual cortex does not show a decreased BOLD response, as is typical in sighted people when doing intense auditory (temporal cortex) tasks.
From the synopsis:
Lepore and colleagues argue that their results show that the visual cortex is specifically recruited to process subtle monaural cues more effectively.
Here’s a link to the full article.