Hello all, I'm a freelance audio reporter, and I'm making a podcast episode about how the blind use language to understand the world in place of visual information. It's well known that the brains of blind people are wired in extraordinary ways to compensate for a lack visual information. In general the blind have much stronger senses than the sighted. And even more incredible, they also have a higher capacity for language.

I interviewed a psychology researcher, Ella Striem-Amit, at Harvard University who studies how the brain activity of blind people differs from that of sighted people. In a recent study, she found that the the brains of blind people are more active and have more connectivity between brain regions than the brains of sighted people when they're presented with the same words / concepts.

The research is super interesting, but the story would be incomplete without hearing from someone who is blind or visually impaired. I want to better understand how the blind and visually impaired use language and metaphors to understand things that are purely visual. I would be especially interested to talk to someone who has become blind or visually impaired later in life to ask if they've had to start using language in different ways.

If there's anyone in this forum who is blind or visually impaired, interested in language, and interested in being a part of this project, please contact me! I hope that as an audio story, this project can serve the blind community in terms of subject and medium. Thank you!