Do you know how many times your heart beats in a minute?
Try counting! It’s not easy, right? Well, guess what! According to a study, blind people are better at this game than those who can see. Sounds surprising, doesn’t it?
The Brainy Teams Behind the Findings
Researchers from two universities, Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Jagiellonian University in Poland, decided to play a little heartbeat counting game with some people. Half of them could see, and half of them were blind.
The Heartbeat Challenge
Here’s what they did. They asked 36 blind and 36 sighted people to count their own heartbeats. There was one rule, though.
They couldn’t touch their bodies or check their pulses. It was just them and their heartbeats.
The Surprising Scores
While they were busy counting, the researchers were doing some counting of their own. They used a special device called a pulse oximeter to record everyone’s actual heartbeats.
Then, they compared these with the numbers the people gave them. It was time to find out who had done a better job at counting their heartbeats – the sighted or the blind!
The results were amazing! The blind group had an average score of 0.78 out of 1, while the sighted group scored 0.63 on average. In other words, the blind people were better at feeling their own heartbeats!
Understanding Our Brain’s Superpowers
Dominika Radziun, a Ph.D. student from Karolinska Institutet, was quite excited about this. She said that this shows us how losing one sense can make other senses stronger.
In this case, being blind made people better at sensing what’s happening inside their bodies!
The Heart-Emotion Connection
The researchers think that being good at feeling your heartbeat could help with understanding emotions better.
Previous studies have found a connection between how well people can sense their bodies’ internal state and how they perceive emotions in themselves and others.
For example, if we are scared, our hearts beat faster. So, if blind people are better at sensing their heartbeats, maybe they are also better at understanding their emotions.
What’s Next?
Dominika Radziun and her team aren’t done with this fascinating subject just yet. They want to find out more about how blind people perceive their own bodies.
They’re also curious about whether changes in the brain area responsible for vision might explain why blind people are so good at sensing their bodies’ internal signals.
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The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
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