HomeA Unique Ability Of Blind People You Didn't Know

A Unique Ability Of Blind People You Didn’t Know

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What Blind People Can Do Better Than Sight People

This research sheds light on the brain’s adaptability and demonstrates how losing one sense can amplify others.

A study conducted by scientists from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Jagiellonian University in Poland reveals that blind individuals exhibit a superior ability to sense their own heartbeats compared to sighted people. The study suggests that blindness results in an enhanced capacity to perceive internal bodily signals.

These findings can be found in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

In the study, thirty-six blind and an equal number of sighted participants were instructed to count their own heartbeats without taking their pulse or touching their bodies. Meanwhile, the researchers monitored the participants’ actual heartbeats using a pulse oximeter. By comparing the reported and recorded numbers, the researchers evaluated the participants’ ability to accurately sense their own heartbeats.

The results revealed that blind participants outperformed their sighted counterparts in sensing their heartbeats. On a scale where a perfect score was represented by 1.0, the blind group achieved an average accuracy of 0.78, while the sighted group’s average accuracy was 0.63.

“The blind participants were much better at counting their own heartbeats than the sighted participants in our study and in several previous studies,” adds Dominika Radziun. “It gives us important information about the brain’s plasticity and how the loss of one sense can enhance others, in this case the ability to feel what happens inside your own body.”

The researchers suggest that heightened heartbeat awareness may offer benefits in terms of emotional processing. Previous research has established a connection between interoceptive accuracy, or the ability to discern the body’s internal state, and an individual’s aptitude for perceiving emotions in themselves and others.

According to Dominika Radziun, there is a strong connection between heart signals and emotions, such as an increased heart rate during fearful experiences. It’s plausible that the heightened sensitivity of blind individuals to their own heart signals could also influence their emotional experiences.

The research team plans to further investigate how blind individuals perceive their own bodies, exploring whether structural alterations in the visual cortex, the brain area typically responsible for vision, could account for the enhanced capacity to detect internal bodily signals.

Source: 10.1037/xge0001366

Image Credit: Getty

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