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---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Study shows the blind do have enhanced senses ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- WASHINGTON (September 12, 1997 00:33 a.m. EDT) - Long-held beliefs that blind people develop keener senses to make up for their lack of sight may actually be true, researchers reported on Thursday. They have found that the brains of blind people can re-wire neurons meant to go to the eyes, using them instead for touch. Leonardo Cohen and colleagues at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, said they built on earlier studies that showed the visual cortex of a blind person often gets activated when he or she is reading in Braille. They tested a group of five sighted people against five people blind since they were babies. The blind volunteers read Braille, while the sighted people felt embossed letters on a page. Both groups received transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a harmless current, to the brain's visual cortex area. TMS caused the blind people to make errors while reading Braille but did not interfere with the letter-reading of sighted subjects, Cohen's team reported in the science journal Nature. Cohen, chief of the human cortical physiology unit at the institute, said this probably meant the blind people had somehow re-wired their brains. But he said it was not clear whether they could use these new connections usefully. "The findings may help explain some of the superior tactile abilities of blind people," he said. Copyright 1997 Nando.net Copyright 1997 Reuter Information Service <http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/091297/health26_4449_noframes.html> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [log in to unmask]