MSN - Blind people hear better: truth or myth?

A popular perception holds that blind people have a highly developed sense of hearing. As the thinking goes, our five senses work in concert with one another such that the loss of one is compensated by increased sensitivity in the remaining four…

Until recently, there had been little scientific evidence that blind people really do benefit from sensory compensation. At the Montreal Neurological Institute of Canada's McGill University, graduate students working under the tutelage of Robert Zatorre, Ph.D., a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist, put popular perceptions to the test. Their results confirmed expectations—and also yielded some exciting surprises...