Cortical plasticity in an early blind musician: an fMRl study

Many studies have examined tactile perception and simple auditory perception in the blind, but none have previously investigated the neural basis of musical ability in this group. This topic is of particular interest because it has been suggested that early blind individuals may possess advanced musical skills (such as absolute pitch). Presumably, these skills could be the result of neural plasticity. It has been hard to empirically assess this claim because of the difficulty in recruiting an adequate number of subjects for use in a conventional paradigm. In the present paper, we report data from a congenitally blind musician, subject ML. Behavioral tests show that she possessed absolute pitch abilities that were similar to those of a reference group of AP musicians with normal vision. To examine the neural basis of her abilities we then tested subject ML and five control subjects using an fMRI paradigm. A regions-of-interest analysis found that similar areas (the right secondary auditory cortex, left IFG, left SMG) were activated in ML and the control subjects, to a similar degree, in response to music processing. However, ML showed additional activations in left parietal association cortices and extrastriate regions of the occipital lobe. Subject ML's data are consistent with a vast body of literature on blindness-induced plasticity. They extend these findings by demonstrating that cortical plasticity may underlie special musical skills as well. These data illustrate the potential value of case studies to investigate particularly rare phenotypes.