Blind people are better at sensing their own heartbeats than sighted, shows a study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Sweden and Jagiellonian University in Poland. The study indicates that blindness leads to a heightened ability in feeling signals from the inner body.

The findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Thirty-six blind and as many sighted individuals were asked to count their own heartbeats without checking their pulse or touching their body. At the same time, the researchers recorded the participants actual heartbeats with a pulse oximeter. Then, they compared the reported with the recorded numbers to assess to what degree the participants were able to sense their own heartbeats.

The analysis showed that the blind participants were superior at sensing their heartbeats than sighted participants. The blind group had an average accuracy of 0.78 while the sighted group had an accuracy of 0.63 on average, according to a scale where 1.0 represented a perfect score.

“The blind participants were much better at counting their own heartbeats than the sighted participants in our study and in several previous studies,” says Dominika Radziun, PhD student at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.

“It gives us important information about the brain’s plasticity and how the loss of one sense can enhance others, in this case the ability to feel what happens inside your own body,” he said. (QNA)

Source: Qatar News Agency