Lotfi B. Merabet, Roy Hamilton, Gottfried Schlaug, Jascha D. Swisher, Elaine T. Kiriakopoulos, Naomi B. Pitskel, Thomas Kauffman, Alvaro Pascual-Leone

The loss of vision has been associated with enhanced performance in non-visual tasks such as tactile discrimination and sound localization. Current evidence suggests that these functional gains are linked to the recruitment of the occipital visual cortex for non-visual processing, but the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these crossmodal changes remain uncertain. One possible explanation is that visual deprivation is associated with an unmasking of non-visual input into visual cortex.