Humans are unique among animals not only in
their shared cognitive capacities but also in their remarkable adaptability to
diverse environments. Studies with people born blind provide insights into the
mechanisms of human flexibility. Contrary to the suppositions of early
empiricist philosophers, blind and sighted people share rich ‘visual'
knowledge, including knowledge of color, light and visual perception,
demonstrating the power of social, linguistic and inferential learning, which
enables humans to go far beyond the senses. On the other hand, evidence from
blindness reveals the remarkable flexibility of the human cortex. ‘Visual’ occipital
cortices appear to serve drastically different cognitive functions across
sighted and congenitally blind people: visual perception in the sighted,
higher-order cognition in people born blind. This pattern suggests ‘wetware
pluripotency’ at birth i.e., the same cortical tissue can assume drastically
different functions in the face of different experience. Finally, I will
discuss evidence from Braille as a case study of how culture reuses cortical
architecture, including connectivity for ‘unintended’ purposes. Blindness is
just one example of the human brain adapting to change, supporting cultural
inventions such as reading, math and computer programming. There is no ‘normal’
brain, instead, we are born with a protobrain that is built to learn and adapt
to our particular environment.
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