When you become blind or deaf, how does this affect your other senses?

Question

I was just wondering because blind people seem to have rich, fulfilling lives.

Answer 1

you become EXTREMELY intuitive. You see when the body has two less senses to worry about it trains the others. The sixth sense is then where the body concentrates becoming psychic, reading someones intentions. Your taste also becomes extremely sensitive. Your body does what it must to function without these two senses.

Why do you ask though?

Answer 2

Your other senses sharpen. Your body is desperately trying to make up for this lost sense, and identify the things around you.

Answer 3

Most often then not it will enhance them.

Answer 4

There is some evidence that if it happens before birth, or when very young, the cortex can (very minutely, relatively) rearrange so some of the visual cortex cvan be used in processing other senses. There is a critical period in which these changes can occur - and this is when very young

http://www.med.upenn.edu/ins/Journal%20C...

However, other studies suggest senses do *not* improve, and these have been reliably repeated in many situations

http://www.psychonomic.org/search/view.c...

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journ...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12410...

The blind did not outperform the sighted in smell/taste tasks, but *trained* people outperformed untrained.

So it appears blindness does not improve the senses. However, this subjective feeling of improvement may easily come from the increased attention to them, or becoming more used to (trained, in effect) understanding the information from these senses as it applies to the reall world. So you may use these senses better, but their actual level of ability (sharpness, discrimination etc) will be the same as a sighted person

However, there *is* some evidence of improved ability in hearing tasks, but this is not a huge difference, highly contested, and possibly due to differences in processing rather than the actual senses themselves.

http://www.neuroreport.com/pt/re/neurore...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob...

http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr...

Answer 5

I can't speak for those who are permanently blind, but I was totally blind for about 6 months and during that time period, my sense of touch was enhanced and my hearing was sharper. Thanks to cataract surgery, I recovered 20:20 vision.