"The eye is something like a camera, but there is a whole lot more to vision than that. One profound difference is that our vision, like the rest of our senses, is malleable and modifiable by experience. Take the commonplace observation that people deprived of one sense may have a compensatory increase in others — for example, that blind people have heightened senses of hearing and touch. A skeptic could say that this was just a matter of attention, concentration and practice at the task, rather than a true sensory improvement. Indeed, experiments show that a person’s sensory acuity can achieve major improvement with practice.

"Yet with modern methodologies, neuroscientists have conclusively proved that the circuits of the brain neurons do physically change. Our senses are malleable because the sensory centers of the brain rewire themselves to strike a useful balance between the capacities of the available neural resources and the demands put on them by incoming sensory impressions. Studies of this phenomenon are revealing that some sensory areas have innate tendencies toward certain functions, but they show just as powerfully the plasticity of the developing brain."

Book Excerpt: The Brain Reshapes Our Malleable Senses to Fit the World