While a leading theory suggests our visual experiences are linked to our understanding of numbers, a study of people who have been blind from birth suggests the opposite.
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“It’s actually hard to think of a situation when you might process numbers through any modality other than vision,” says Shipra Kanjlia….
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In people with sight, the visual cortex is responsible for processing visual information and is not involved in maths. But this brain area, which is not needed for vision by people who have never had sight, seems to have been assigned a new function in these blind people.
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But we don’t know yet if using the visual cortex in this way gives blind people an advantage in arithmetic or language. “It’s like they have this extra bit of brain that’s active during a mathematics test,” says Kanjlia. “Does it help?”
It might: the blind volunteers who gave the most correct answers to the maths questions also had the most brain activity in the visual cortex.
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