Saturday, January 1, 2011

In a fascinating piece...

...in the Times today, "This Year, Change Your Mind," Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist, describes the human brain's ability to adapt (my emphasis):

The writer Ved Mehta, also blind since early childhood, navigates in large part by using “facial vision” — the ability to sense objects by the way they reflect sounds, or subtly shift the air currents that reach his face. Ben Underwood, a remarkable boy who lost his sight at 3 and died at 16 in 2009, developed an effective, dolphin-like strategy of emitting regular clicks with his mouth and reading the resulting echoes from nearby objects. He was so skilled at this that he could ride a bike and play sports and even video games.

Read the rest of it here.

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