Did you know that blindness disrupts the organization of the cerebral cortex and modifies memory? Losing one of our senses upsets the others. This is why it seems blind people generally have more developed sense of smell, hearing, touch and taste than average.
Researchers wanted to understand what the brain’s response to vision loss was, so they conducted a study of the brains of blind mice at the German Ruhr University in Bochum.
Scientists observed the brains of mice just after the onset of their blindness and performed spatial memory tests to evaluate their memory. They measured the density of neurotransmitter receptors: these are proteins located in the neuron’s membrane that receive the neurotransmitters, chemical messengers. The researchers compared this density in blind mice to that of healthy mice. Mice that had lost their sight had a modified density of neurotransmitter receptors and a deterioration of the plasticity of synapses in the hippocampus. The latter corresponds to the capacity of the connections between neurons (synapses) to modify their force according to the function they have.