Clip from Tom's Interview With Luke Ford...Does Blindness Enhance other Senses?

[Luke Ford]One question for publication:

I had this sense during our interview that your blindness enables you to see people, in some ways, more clearly than the sighted. That your blindness enhances many of your other senses. Is this true?

[Tom Lange]

It's interesting that you would say that. Perhaps that's because it seemed that I was more tuned in to you as we were talking and not distracted by the visual. It is a common misconception that blind people's remaining senses are innately sharper and that some blind people have some sort of "sixth sense". The latter, in my view, is somewhat ludicrous. It is true, that our remaining senses can and do become sharper, but they aren't innately so. Rather, they become that way out of necessity. In other words, whenvision decreases or is lost altogether, there's no physiological "magic switch" that is thrown which immediately cranks up the other senses into overdrive. Instead, touch, hearing and smell become heightened because we use them more to gather clues about our environment. There are, however, physiological aspects to this that become apparent over time. Laboratory studies now show that when the visual cortex of the brain becomes idle following vision loss at an early age, the brain will, over time in effect "rewire itself", so that the visuall cortex, or portions of it, may be assigned the task of auditory processing to supplement the capabilities of the existing auditory centers. If vision is restored later in life, as was the case with Michael May, the person will be ill-equipped to process visual images and may in fact have to "learn to see" all over again, with varying degrees of success.
Interesting, eh?