In individuals blind from birth, the visual cortex can be repurposed to process tactile information, such as for Braille reading.

“So that's an extreme level of plasticity. But what it shows, is the visual cortex is kind of a general purpose processing machine, it's good at spatial information and the skin of your fingers is just another spatial sense and deprived of any other input the brain seems smart enough if you want to put it that way to rewire itself to use that real estate for something useful, in this case, reading braille.”

“So that's an extreme level of plasticity. But what it shows is the visual cortex is kind of a general purpose processing machine. It's good at spatial information and the skin of your fingers is just another spatial sense.”

“And deprived of any other input, the brain seems smart enough, if you want to put it that way, to rewire itself to use that real estate for something uh useful.”

“So what appears to have been the case and this has been confirmed in other ways by imaging experiments in humans is that in people who are blind from very early in birth, the visual cortex gets repurposed as a center for processing tactile information.”