as memorizing Homer’s Iliad, might blindfold himself to recruit operators usually devoted to sight, since the vast operators in the visual cortex can process sound. In Homer’s time, long poems were composed and passed from generation to generation in oral form. (Homer, according to tradition, was himself blind.) Memorization was essential in preliterate cultures; indeed, illiteracy may have prompted people’s brains to assign more operators to auditory tasks. Yet such feats of oral memory are possible in literate cultures if there is sufficient motivation. For centuries Yemenite Jews taught
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