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Stevie Wonder never considered his blindness a “disadvantage,” and he’s proved his point for more than 50 years. But for all his fantastic talent, his blindness may have contributed to his skills nonetheless. Research has found overwhelming evidence to suggest that blind musicians’ brains can be a lot more musically attuned than those of sighted musicians.
Changed brains. When blind individuals lose their sight at early ages, it’s certainly a disadvantage. But it has interesting positive effects as far as musical sensitivity goes. Blind children’s brains undergo radical changes in order to make better use of the sensory inputs they can gather. Numerous fMRI and lesion studies suggest that individuals blind since childhood repurpose large portions of their visual cortex in order to respond better to auditory stimuli. The younger children are when they lose their sight, the more powerful their auditory cortex can be, thanks to increased neural plasticity in place during infancy/early childhood/young childhood.
Ray Charles, for instance, went blind by age 7. Studies out of the University of Melbourne have found that people who go blind at younger ages develop better pitch discrimination and pitch-timbre discrimination than sighted people, regardless of their levels of musical training. Obviously musical training bolsters those abilities, but blind people seem to start with a more sensitive neural foundation.
