This is scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Suzanne Bard.

The human brain is remarkably adaptable, constantly being shaped by life experience.

A striking example is that in blind people,

the brain's visual cortex is repurposed

for auditory tasks, such as detecting motion and pinpointing where a sound is coming from.

But its adopted functions could be even more complex.

And the question is, well how much can this part of the brain change its function and people who are born blind.

Johns Hopkins cognitive neuroscientist Marina Bedney.

She and her team had blind and sighted volunteers listen to audio clips from entertaining movies while undergoing

functional MRI scans of their brains. The goal was to find out if among

blind people the visual cortex is activated consistently for complex auditory tasks.

So we take brain activity in one person and we correlate it to brain activity in another person.

It gives you a way to directly compare

how similar the processing of two brains is

when they're listening to a given stimulus.

And so that can tell us, for example, whether the visual

courtesies of different blind people are doing the same thing at the same time.

The result? You get massive synchrony over something like 65% of the occipital lobe, which is a lot of cortical

territory.

In other words, in blind participants, most areas of the visual cortex were activated at the same time by the movie audio, but the

visual cortices of sighted people didn't show consistent activation.

What's more, the similarities became much less pronounced among the blind participants

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