This is something anyone may have observed for a long time: many blind musicians don’t seem to be handicapped at all when they play,… on the contrary! Ray Charles, Stevie Wonders, Doc Watson, Jose Feliciano are the most famous names who come to mind, but there are many more of them, and they all excel(led) despite having what I consider the biggest handicap of all. According to the famous science journal Nature, a new study published in Neuron, provides some new clues.
This study was done on mice and before you ask if these little rodents have their own Ray Charles, let’s explain what was done. Hey-Kyoung Lee, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and her collaborators took two groups of mice, and kept the first group in the dark for a week, while the second group enjoyed a normal life under the sunlight. To monitor the sound perceptions of the mice, the researchers used electrodes and measured the activity in their primary auditory cortex. They didn’t play music to the animals but sounds of different frequencies and intensities and the results showed that neurons of the mice kept in the dark could ‘hear much softer sounds’ than the other animals. ‘They also have much finer discrimination ability as far as identifying pitch goes,’ explained Hey-Kyoung Lee.
The study is surprising because it was believed that such a change would require a long time, and that people would have been blind for a long time (generally during childhood) would be the ones adapting the best. But Lee proved changes were done very fast: ‘Moreover, the changes in the auditory cortex were achieved by changes in the strength of synaptic connections. These were believed to be unchangeable in adults,’ she explained.
But what can we conclude for human musicians from a study done on blind mice? Lee continues, ‘There’s some evidence that if you don’t have vision, you can locate sound better’… ‘We’ve looked at the level of neurons, and provided a cellular basis for how these functional changes happen at the behavioral level’. Other researchers are skeptical but Lee even explained this research could be beneficial for deaf people: ‘A lot of people are trying to recover their hearing through cochlear implants. They work very well in younger children, who recover perfectly, but adults who are completely deaf have a difficult time recovering their hearing even with these devices. Brief periods of visual deprivation could help people learn to process sound after receiving implants’.
It’s not the first study on the subject of course, this other one shows that visually deprived individuals performed significantly better at tests on harmonicity (the ability to distinguish when layered harmonies are gradually modified) than a control group. According to many studies, it’s not a mystery that the visual cortex of blind people is then used for other senses, and used to process other stimuli such as touch and sound. What’s new here is the rapidity of the process, these mice showed some significant differences just after a week of blindness.
Oliver Sacks, the famous neurobiologist who wrote so many fascinating books (and among them ‘Musicophilia’) gave this explanation in an interview with Wired: ‘When one is born without a sense or loses it early, one turns to the other senses to construct the richest possible world and identity. People who are born blind seem to develop extraordinary auditory, tactile, and olfactory sensitivities. Absolute pitch [the ability to identify a note without hearing a reference tone] is pretty rare in the general population — maybe 1 in 10,000 have it. In professional musicians it’s 1 in 10. But in those born blind, musicians or not, it’s nearly 1 in 2. A third of all musical savants are blind. You can be blind without being musical, but there is a correlation.’
This could explain why we close our eyes when we like some music as an attempt to perceive it better, or why many musicians prefer to play in the dark. There is some music that truly doesn’t sound the same in plain daylight compared to what you can experience at night. So should we all go blind for a couple of weeks to be able to appreciate music even more? I just wonder.