ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2024
Blind individuals' enhanced ability to sense their own heartbeat is related to the thickness of their occipital cortex.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Congenital blindness reduces myelination in human visual cortex.Science advances · 2026Article
- The emotional responses to the sounds of organic affective tactile gestures.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Association between cortical thickness and functional response to linguistic processing in the occipital cortex of early blind individuals.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Blindness is associated with heightened sensory abilities, such as improved hearing and tactile acuity. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that blind individuals are better than sighted individuals at perceiving their own heartbeat, suggesting enhanced interoceptive accuracy. Structural changes in the occipital cortex have been hypothesized as the basis of these behavioral enhancements. Indeed, several studies have shown that congenitally blind individuals have increased cortical thickness within occipital areas compared to sighted individuals, but how these structural differences relate to behavioral enhancements is unclear. This study investigated the relationship between cardiac interoceptive accuracy and cortical thickness in 23 congenitally blind individuals and 23 matched sighted controls. Our results show a significant positive correlation between performance in a heartbeat counting task and cortical thickness only in the blind group, indicating a connection between structural changes in occipital areas and blind individuals' enhanced ability to perceive heartbeats.
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