In 1688, the Irish scientist William Molyneux posed the following problem in a letter to John Locke: if a person blind from birth acquires sight in adulthood and looks at a cube and a sphere , geometric figures that he previously knew how to recognize and name thanks to touch Would he be able to distinguish with his sight what he already knew how to identify with his hands? An affirmative answer, according to Molyneux, would imply that we had an innate – and independent of the senses – concept of certain concepts, such as the sphere.
Three centuries later, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have managed to solve the problem of Molyneux by studying a group of Indian children blind from birth , aged between 8 and 17 years, who had recovered their sight after an operation . As Pawas Sinha and his colleagues explain in the journal Nature Neuroscience , at first the subjects could not immediately recognize with their eyes what they had previously felt with their hands, which indicates that the brain does not create a single representation of things by relating different types of sensory information – in this case, visual and tactile. However, they acquired this ability with surprising speed within a few days of practice, suggesting that our brains possess more plasticity than previously thought even after the first few years of life.
