Seeing the world around you doesn’t necessarily require a set of eyeballs, and blind rats have just proven it. In a recently published study, blind rats fitted with geomagnetic compasses that sent electric signals to their brains quickly learned to navigate a maze just as well as rats with full vision. The results, researchers say, hint at the extraordinary sensory flexibility of the mammalian brain, and could yield devices that could help blind people safely navigate in their environment.
In terms of perceiving our world, our eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue do a pretty good job. However, as far as the brain is concerned, these organs aren’t really necessary to make sense of the world. For example, scientists have proven that after surgery ferrets’ auditory cortex can respond to visual stimuli from the eyes — i.e., hearing with sight. In fact, there's an array of devices that substitute one ...
