Deaf people develop sharper peripheral vision, brain scans reveal

Bengaluru: In a remarkable example of the human brain’s adaptability to sensory loss, scientists have found that people with deafness develop superior peripheral vision, which is vision outside the eyes’ central focus.

Researchers from the Universities of York and Sheffield used MRI scans along with visual stimuli among 16 hearing adults and 16 deaf adults and compared them. They found that the latter group responded to objects and movements even in the far-reaches of their eyesight, granting them an extra advantage in sensing their environment and detecting danger.

Interestingly, the study found that the brain does not entirely expand its visual processing capacity, but provides more power to peripheral vision and a little less to the central visual field to people with deafness.

The brain is rewired, with a redistribution of neural resources: among the deaf, there was a greater neural weightage given to far-peripheral vision in the primary visual cortex, the study found.