For years, the idea that blind people can hear better than sighted people was considered something of an old canard. However, functional brain imaging now has allowed us to look inside the brains of blind people who possess what can only be termed cerebral superpowers – the ability to understand speech at up to 25 syllables per second, a speed that sounds like "noise" to sighted people (a typical sighted person understands closer to 10 syllables per second). As it turns out, a brain region called V1, situated at the back of the skull and which normally only responds to light has actually been rewired in the brains of blind people – and now processes auditory information. This is truly a stunning example of the brain's plasticity, a topic of cardinal importance in designing educational experiences and materials to best engage the brains of students. Of course, in discussing the brain's amazing plasticity, modern thinkers take for granted something that would have been shocking to thinkers from Aristotle (who posited a holistic, non-corporeal mind in De Anima in the 4th century, BC) through Descartes (who argued, in the 17th century, for mind-body dualism) – the idea that the mind is physically located in the brain and that our intellect, personality, and selfhood are attributable to physical processes in the brain and can be altered by brain injuries.