His name was Ronnie Millsap. And you may or may not have heard of him, but in the 70s and 80s, he dominated pop music and country Western markets. He released 35 country music kits at the number one slot. And he earned six Grammy awards. Now, you might think it's amazing that Ronnie Millsap could be blind and have such an amazing musical career. But this is actually not such an uncommon story. Think of Andrea Bocelli or Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, or Diane Schor, or Jose Feliciano, or Jeff Healy. All of them are blind. For all of them, their brains learned to rely on the signals of sound and touch in their environment. And they became better at processing those signals than sighted people. As I write about my book Live Wired, musical stardom is not guaranteed for people who are blind, but brain reorganization is guaranteed. Because if a sense is not getting used, like vision, it gets taken over by neighboring senses. There's nothing special about the cells, the neurons in the visual cortex at the back of your brain. They are simply neurons that happened to be involved in processing edges or colors for people who have functioning eyes. But if you go blind, these exact same neurons can process other types of information. So the territory gets redeployed, it gets taken over by hearing and by touch, and you get better at those other senses. For Ronnie Millsap, his visual cortex was not getting used because his eyes were not functioning. So these other brain areas took over and he got better at those. As a result, perfect musical pitch, for example, is much more common in the blind population. And blind people are up to 10 times better at determining whether a musical pitch is subtly wobbling up and down. Why? It's just because they have more brain territory devoted to the task of listening. There was a recent experiment in which people who were sighted or blind had one ear plugged up and then they were asked to point to the locations of sounds in the room. And pinpointing where a sound is coming from normally requires a comparison of the signals at both ears. So it was expected that everyone would fail miserably at this task. And that's what happened with the people who could see. But for the blind participants, they were able to generally tell where the sounds were positioned. How? It's because the exact shape of the cartilage of the outer ear, even just one ear, it bounces sound around in subtle ways that gives clues to location. But only if one is highly attuned to pick up on those very subtle signals. So people with sight, they have less cortex devoted to sound. And so their ability to extract subtle sound information, it's underdeveloped. But with blind people, that skill gets developed. And this sort of extreme talent with sound, this is common among the blind. Take a young man named Ben Underwood, when he was two years old, Ben stopped seeing out of his left eye. And his mother took him to the doctor and they soon discovered that he had retinal cancer that was in both eyes. So they tried chemotherapy, they tried radiation, but that didn't work. And finally, the surgeons had to remove both of his eyes. And you can imagine the pain that the family went through here. But by the time Ben was seven years old, he devised a technique that was totally unexpected and unbelievably useful, which is that he would click with his mouth and he would listen for the returning echoes. And in this way, he could hear the locations of an open doorway or of a person or of a parked car or a garbage can and so on. He was echo locating. He was bouncing his sound waves off objects in the environment and he was listening to what returned. Now I'd like to introduce you to Meaningful Beauty, the famed skincare brand created by iconic supermodel, Cindy Crawford. It's her secret to absolutely gorgeous skin. Meaningful Beauty makes powerful and effective skincare simple and it's loved by millions of women. It's formulated for all ages and all skin tones and types and it's designed to work as a complete skincare system, leaving your skin feeling soft, smooth and nourished. I recommend starting with Cindy's full regimen, which contains all five of her best-selling products, including the amazing youth activating Melon Serum. This next generation serum has the power of Melon Leave Stem Cell technology. It's Melon Leave Stem Cells encapsulated for freshness and released onto the skin to support a visible reduction in the appearance of wrinkles. With thousands of glowing 5 star reviews, why not give it a try? Subscribe today and you can get the amazing Meaningful Beauty system for just $49.95.