Blind people have enhanced hearing. I would not be surprised if they have better touch and smell too. I have never heard of blind people dominating a field except where there is an obvious hearing component (like echolocation and hacking analog phones).
I think the vision centers of blind people get repurposed into non-vision sensory centers, but that higher-level cognitive ability remains unchanged. We have to be careful when testing the working memory of blind people because available brain matter isn’t the only variable getting modified. Blind people have to memorize more of their environment than sighted people do.
If hominids evolved without a sense of sight then they would improve other senses to compensate. To get an intelligence boost from blind humans, we would need to keep the encephalization quotient constant while reducing the cortical matter dedicated to processing sensory data.
If this post is correct then the human brain has way more compute than is required for high-level cognition.
I have an alternative hypothesis tho: we could say “big brains are for big problems”. As you stated, a blind person still has a similar computational problem to solve, namely navigating a complex 3D environment. In some cases, tons of sense-data will be very easily processed, due to the simplicity of what’s being looked for in that sense data. (Are there cases of animals with very large retinas, but comparatively small brains?)
The sad part of this hypothesis is that it’s difficult to test, as it doesn’t make specific predictions. You’d need to somehow know the computational complexity of surviving in a given environment. (Or, more precisely, the computational complexity where a bigger brain is too much of a cost...)
Blind people have enhanced hearing. I would not be surprised if they have better touch and smell too. I have never heard of blind people dominating a field except where there is an obvious hearing component (like echolocation and hacking analog phones).
I think the vision centers of blind people get repurposed into non-vision sensory centers, but that higher-level cognitive ability remains unchanged. We have to be careful when testing the working memory of blind people because available brain matter isn’t the only variable getting modified. Blind people have to memorize more of their environment than sighted people do.
If hominids evolved without a sense of sight then they would improve other senses to compensate. To get an intelligence boost from blind humans, we would need to keep the encephalization quotient constant while reducing the cortical matter dedicated to processing sensory data.
If this post is correct then the human brain has way more compute than is required for high-level cognition.
Yep. All sounds right.
I have an alternative hypothesis tho: we could say “big brains are for big problems”. As you stated, a blind person still has a similar computational problem to solve, namely navigating a complex 3D environment. In some cases, tons of sense-data will be very easily processed, due to the simplicity of what’s being looked for in that sense data. (Are there cases of animals with very large retinas, but comparatively small brains?)
The sad part of this hypothesis is that it’s difficult to test, as it doesn’t make specific predictions. You’d need to somehow know the computational complexity of surviving in a given environment. (Or, more precisely, the computational complexity where a bigger brain is too much of a cost...)