14 DAY TRIAL // A team of University of Bath researchers has recently published a paper stating that, when compared to people who can see, blind individuals are likely to possess better memory skills.
The specialists go on to argue that, as far as they can tell, blind people's impressive memory skills are their way of keeping tabs on the world around them without getting any help from the sense of sight.
Interestingly enough, it appears that only congenially blind people (i.e. people who have been blind since birth) possess such memory skills.
The official website for the University of Bath says that the claims made by these researchers are based on information collected while asking three different groups of people to undergo a memory-based test.
The first of these groups of people was made up of volunteers who had been blind since birth, while the second group was made up of blind people who had lost their sight at some point after being born.
People who had no issues seeing were chosen by the researchers to form the third group.
The people who agreed to take part in these investigations were all asked to listen to a list of words and try to remember as many of them as they could.
Apart from wishing to figure out which group of people remembered the most words, the researchers also hoped to determine which group was less likely to create so-called false memories (i.e. add new words to the list simple because they appeared to belong there).
Long story short, those congenially blind were found to be the ones able to recall the most words. Furthermore, they were the least likely to piece together false memories.
“We found that congenitally blind participants reported significantly more correct words than both late onset blind and sighted people.”
“Most of the congenitally blind participants avoided unrelated words, therefore congenitally blind participants can store more items and with a higher fidelity,” argued researcher Dr. Achille Pasqualotto.
The findings of this study concerning the memory skills of congenially blind people were recently published in the journal Behavioral Brain Research.