Physical Senses
Many people believe that when people lose one of their physical senses, their other senses become more sensitive to compensate for the missing sense. The idea that blind people have hearing that is more acute than others has been around for ages. Do you believe this? Why or why not?
Sample Solution
Physical Senses
The sensation of sound occurs when the vibrations from sounds enter our ear and cause little hair like structures, called hair cells, within our inner ear to move back and forth. The hair cells transform this movement into an electrical signal that the brain can use. How well a person can hear largely depend on how intact these hair cells are. Once lost, they don’t grow back, and this is no different for blind people. So blind people can’t physically hear well than others. Yet blind people often outperform sighted people in hearing tasks such as locating the source of sounds. The reason for this emerges when we look beyond the sensory organs, at what is happening with the brain, and how the sensory information is processed by it. In blind people, the visual cortex gets a bit “bored” without visual inputs and starts to “rewire” itself, becoming more responsive to information from the other remaining senses.
