Question: Are there parts of the brain we could use but we don't and what would they help us do?

Rebecca Dewey answered on 22 Jun 2015:

Not really – pretty much every part of the brain is used for something!

However, in people who are lacking one of their senses, or a part of their body, such as a limb, the part of the brain that usually deals with that thing therefore isn’t being used. When a part of the brain no longer has any inputs to is, then it can start to change. Part of my research is to observe this in deaf people who have no hearing at all. What we find is that the part of their brain that would usually deal with hearing can become linked and get used by another part of the brain, such as vision or touch, and that the hearing part of the brain will activate when the person looks at pictures or feels something. Similarly in someone who has no vision, and is severely blind, the vision part of the brain can learn to process sounds. Occasionally (but this is more rare) the hearing or vision part of the brain will carry on processing the right sensory information, but because it isn’t getting any information from the sense organ (ears or eyes) then it can start to amplify the general low-level noise signals that are being sent in the background and people sometimes report hearing sounds like ringing (this is thought to be one of the many causes of tinnitus) or seeing bright lights. When someone has lost a limb, the part of their brain that usually deals with signals from that limb can also amplify noise signals from the general background, and this could be one of the causes of “phantom limb” sensations.