A The comic-book superhero Daredevil ( 超胆侠 ) became blind by accident, but his blindness only made his other senses superhuman. It’s commonly believed that deaf or blind people may have other Daredevil-like senses. But the reality is that people with one impaired ( 受损的 ) sense don’t have general improvements in their other senses, but rather very specific brain changes, new research shows. Scientists are now uncovering some of the brain differences that underlie changes or improvements in other senses. “For example, research shows that people who are deaf from birth tend to be more sensitive to light or movement in their peripheral vision ( 周边视觉 ), compared with people who can hear,” said Christina Karns, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon. Karns and her colleagues wanted to know whether the areas of the brain responsible ( 负责的 ) for hearing were also organized differently in deaf people, compared with people who could hear. In experiments with people who can hear, when the participants( 参与者 ) see a light flashed in their peripheral vision and hear two beeps at the same time, they experience the illusion ( 错觉 ) that they saw two flashes of light. Karns’ team did the same experiment with deaf individuals, except that the beeps were replaced with puffs of air on the participants’ faces. Deaf people reported seeing two flashes of light when they felt two puffs of air, suggesting they use touch the same way hearing people use sound to improve visual accuracy ( 精确性 ). “Hearing people are doing this all the time,” said Karns, who presented her findings. “Deaf people don’t have sound, so they end up building a visual system that’s more accurate.” But the improvements in deaf people’s other senses are very specific. Studies show that vision in the fovea, the central part of the eye, is no better in deaf people than in hearing people. Also, the improvements aren’t seen in people who become deaf later in life. One of the big questions driving research on this topic is whether being deaf or blind frees up brain areas for other senses. Stephen Lomber, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario, and colleagues found that cooling down the hearing cortex ( 皮层 ) of deaf cats caused the animals to lose their improved peripheral vision, suggesting those brain areas had, indeed, been related to vision. Taken together, the research into the differences between deaf people’s brains and hearing people’s brains shows there’s a lot of hope for ways we can train our brains. But humans haven’t developed super senses just yet.