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Why do the blind perceive their heartbeat better than the sighted?

MADRID, 26 Mar.

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Why do the blind perceive their heartbeat better than the sighted?

MADRID, 26 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Does the loss of one sense sharpen all the others? It is a classic reasoning that has just been reinforced by a study published in the journal 'Journal of Experimental Psychology: General': blindness entails a greater ability to sense signals from inside the body.

Specifically, this study, carried out by researchers from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Jagiellonian University in Poland, has shown that the blind perceive their own heartbeat better than the sighted.

Thirty-six blind and sighted people were asked to count their own heartbeats without taking their pulses or touching their bodies. At the same time, the researchers recorded the participants' actual heartbeats with a pulse oximeter. They then compared the reported numbers with the recorded ones to assess the extent to which the participants were able to perceive their own heartbeats.

The analysis showed that the blind participants perceived their heartbeats better than the sighted ones. The blind group had a mean accuracy of 0.78, while the sighted group had a mean accuracy of 0.63, on a scale where 1.0 represented a perfect score.

"In our study and in previous ones, blind participants were much better than sighted ones at counting their own heartbeats," says Dominika Radziun, PhD student at the Karolinska Institutet's Department of Neuroscience. "It gives us important information about the plasticity of the brain and how the loss of one sense can enhance others, in this case the ability to feel what is happening inside your own body."

According to the researchers, this ability to perceive the heartbeat can be an advantage when it comes to processing emotions. Previous studies have linked the degree of interoceptive accuracy, that is, the ability to perceive the internal state of the body, with how well people perceive emotions in themselves and in others.

"We know that heart signals and emotions are closely interrelated; for example, our hearts beat faster when we are afraid. It is possible that blind people's increased sensitivity to their own heart signals also influences their emotional experiences." says Dominika Radziun.

The research group will now continue to study how the blind perceive their own bodies, examining whether structural changes in the visual cortex, the region of the brain normally responsible for vision, may explain the increased ability to perceive signals from the body.