Blind Brains Turbocharge Speech Processing

Blind people can process speech up to about three times faster, reaching around 25 syllables per second at their best, compared with sighted individuals. Studies have shown that blind participants’ visual cortex responded strongly to spoken language, indicating that the brain had repurposed this area for auditory processing. By reallocating the visual cortex to help decode sound, their brains gained an advantage in handling ultra-fast speech.

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