And yet, Bernard Morin has plenty of company—some of our greatest mathematicians were blind. For example, Leonhard Euler, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, was blind during the last 17 years of his life, and produced nearly half of his work during this time. English mathematician Nicholas Saunderson went blind not long after he was born, but managed to become the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, a position earlier held by Newton and now occupied by theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.
Is there something that allows the blind to excel? The leading theory is that because they cannot rely on visual cues or written materials to remember things, they develop stronger working memory than the sighted, which is critical to doing well at math. Another potential explanation is that because blind children spend a lot of time touching and manipulating objects, they learn to interpret numerical information with multiple senses, giving them an advantage. [...]
Scientists are still puzzling out what that compensatory mechanism is and how it works. Earlier this year, Olivier Collignon, a psychologist who studies blind cognition at the Université Catholique de Louvain and the University of Trento, in Italy, and his colleagues, published findings that suggest sighted individuals and people who were born blind or became blind early in life perform equally well on simple math problems. There was one key difference—the blind participants actually outperformed their sighted counterparts on more difficult math problems, like addition and subtraction that require carrying over a number (like 45 + 8 or 85 –9); these are considered more difficult than those that don’t (like 12 + 31 or 45 + 14). According to Collignon, the more a task relies on the ability to manipulate numbers in the abstract, like carrying over a number, the more blind individuals’ compensatory mechanisms are engaged.
Collignon and his colleagues had previously found that blind and sighted people experience numbers in completely different ways, in a physical sense. In a 2013 study, the researchers created a clever manipulation of a task typically used to test a perceptual bias called Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes, or SNARC. [...]
Collignon and his colleagues go so far as to suggest that vision may actually hinder the sighted from reaching full mathematical potential. This is thought to be particularly true in the realm of geometry. Sighted people sometimes misapprehend three-dimensional space because the retina projects it onto just two dimensions. Many optical illusions arise out of these misapprehensions. The blind person, by comparison, has a relatively unspoiled intuition of three-dimensional space.
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