One new study demonstrates that blind people are more skilled at sensing their own heartbeats than sighted people. These results suggest that the lack of ability to see the external environment can increase internal awareness.
To assess the sensitivity of different population groups to their own heartbeats heart failure, one study monitored the heart rate of 36 blind and 36 sighted people normal. In addition, each participant was asked to count their heartbeats without making physical contact with their own body.
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The results showed that blind people had an average accuracy of 0.78, while sighted individuals recorded an average accuracy of 0.63, emphasizing how sensory abilities can be amplified in people with disabilities visual.
“This suggests that brain plasticity after blindness leads to a superior ability to detect signals from the heart, which has implications for the study of body awareness and emotional processing in blind individuals,” write the researchers in their paper published.
The technical term for sensitivity to internal body stimuli is interoception. Until now, it was unclear how neuroplasticity in blind people, the nervous system's adaptation to poor vision, might affect interoception.
It remains to be seen why interoception is enhanced in blind people, a question this study fails to answer, but is something that could be addressed in future research. The team also suggests that the sightless individuals may be detecting heartbeat signals from areas of the body other than the heart.
According to neuroscientist Dominika Radziun, from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, “we know that heart signals and emotions are closely intertwined”.
Neuroscientist Dominika Radziun of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden suggests that “when we experience fear, our hearts beat faster. It is possible that blind individuals' greater sensitivity to signals from their own heart also affects their emotional experiences."
What's interesting is that the two groups didn't show major differences in their actual heart rate or their ability to sense that they were being monitored. This suggests that the difference between groups is related to interoception.
The authors of the new study suggest that different parts of the body, related to the processing of cardiac signals, such as the anterior insula in the brain – a region of the insular cortex involved in the regulation of subjective feelings – could be analyzed specifically to deepen this search.
As with many blindness studies, the findings not only tell us more about what it's like to live without vision and how the brain and body adapt, but also about the capabilities and versatility of the brain in general.
According to Radziun, “this provides us with important information about the plasticity of the brain and how the loss of a sense can enhance others, in this case, the ability to feel what happens inside your own body”.
