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[–] 56 points 3 months ago

Brain imaging studies show that in people with congenital cortical blindness, this area is often repurposed for tasks such as language, memory and reasoning. ... Without visual input generating a constant stream of ambiguous or unpredictable signals, the brain may settle into more stable ways of interpreting the world, reducing the risk of the misfiring predictions that characterise schizophrenia.

If that’s true, do congenitally bind people show improvements in general prediction tasks? Could that be why there are so many legends about blind soothsayers?

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  • [–] 33 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Man, these are such tiny numbers I am super skeptical of the claims. Could it be we simply haven't seen a case yet? How many people are born blind? What fraction of the populace experiences schizophrenia? If we go by the damn numbers in the article, 1.6:50000 is schizophrenic over a very long time period. The sample size of 60 is absurdly tiny. 70 years is not a long time. 3 generations in which a miniscule fraction are born blind.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Do you hear voices?
    I can currently hear your voice.
    No, I mean, do you hear voices without seeing where they come from?

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Cool! Now all we need to do is make every newborn blind and there'll be no more schizophrenia. I mean in some barbarian countries cutting parts out of babies is a common practice in the name of "hygiene" anyway.

    --Edit---

    Need i really add /s ?

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    That's also the reason they rarely become famous painters.

    /s

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  • [+] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
    [+] -10 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Well they got that going for them. Maybe they'll stop complaining so much about everything now.

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