Embedded in an article in the New York Times Magazine on blind people, braille, technology and literacy were these statements about how our brains function:
In the 1990s, a series of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the blind are not rendered useless, (emphasis mine) as previously assumed. When test subjects swept their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation in the parts of the brain that typically process visual input.
The architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can reorganize for new functions (emphasis mine). A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience found that blind subjects consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal memory, and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their brains.
This concurs with other studies I have read that portions of the brain dedicated to processing information taken in by our sense of sight are, for people who are born blind, programmed to do other things.
In other words, what Jesus did for the man born blind in John 9 was far more significant than just making his eyes work.
This man’s brain, over decades, would have no ability to process visual images. That portion of his brain would have been reorganized to do something else.
So when Jesus gave him sight, he re-wired his brain. Jesus is amazing!
The Works of God 
Have you heard the man interviewed who had surgery to regain sight? Lost in early childhood, I think. Seeing was very difficult and disorienting, because all his recognition of the world was through the other senses.
the compensation is easier for people born blind. i have seen people who have lost most of their vision strain to see things that they cannot see, when they could have discerned more by feeling or listening. we love our sight, no matter how poor it is.
and in response to noel’s comment, because of such medical miracles, i marvel at the immediate healing that Jesus imparted–no disorientation, no rehabilitation. when he healed, people had immediate, full use of their newly restored senses and strength.
isn’t he indescribably marvelous?
In God’s sovereignty, however, it’s not always so. I rember an incident where a boy was healed of a condition something like severe colour blindness. The world looked very different to him and, after being healed, he was initially quite scared and disoriented. He did, however, adjust fairly quickly.
[…] Knight, in a post at The Works of God, points to an article in the New York Times that talks about how our brain […]
[…] like the man born blind having his brain rewired when Jesus gave him sight, another man, also disabled from birth, experienced far more than what was immediately […]