Thaler co-led a 2021 study showing that both blind and sighted people could learn echolocation with just 10 weeks of training. For more recent work in the journal Cerebral Cortex, she and her colleagues examined the brain changes underlying these abilities. After training, both blind and sighted people displayed responses to echoes in their visual cortex, a finding that challenges the belief that primary sensory regions are wholly sense-specific.
The researchers trained 14 sighted and 12 blind people for between two and three hours twice a week over 10 weeks. They started by teaching participants to produce mouth clicks, then trained them on three tasks. The first two involved judging the size or orientation of objects. The third involved navigating virtual mazes, which participants moved through with the help of simulated click-plus-echo sounds tied to their positions.
Both groups improved on all the tasks.
This sounds like a fun skill to develop.
Really interesting... I watched a tv show about this years ago where the host profiled some blind people who were really good at the maze navigation using little handheld clickers to make a sound. Then the host learned to do it himself in a surprisingly short amount of time, though not nearly as good as them. It always stuck with me.
I suspect there are real cognitive benefits to developing unused parts of your brain like this. I've heard yoga teachers and similar use the term "the body is the mind", and I think they're on to something there.
There are a bunch of studies about how balance training could rapidly grow certain parts of the brain and it has impacts on memory and cognition.
Also reminds me of the Guugu Yimidhirr people or Tzeltal Maya people who have an impossibly precise internal compass developed through their language. The human brain is capable of what seems like superhuman shit!
The system of spatial coordination inscribed in the language is totally different from that in Western languages, where the reference system is relative with respect to the subject. In Guugu Yimidhirr, as in Kayardild space is rendered in absolute terms,[28] like the cardinal points, north, south, east, west, independent of whether something is in front of, behind, to the left or right of a person. The language thus provides them with a mental map, allowing quite a precise dead-reckoning of all points around them wherever they are.[29] For example, if your Guugu Yimidhirr guest, on leaving your house, had to inform you he or she had left her tobacco behind, they would be required to state grammatically in their native language something like: I left it on the southern table in the western side of your house.[30]
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