I seem to have awareness that people have redirected the auditory and visual cortexes as an experiment and found that sight and hearing were recovered eventually?
Unfortunately I can't find a source to verify this so hoping someone with better knowledge could confirm that this is just how plastic the brain can be?
There also an experiment where they remove the rods and cones of mice and replace them with light sensitive proteins from some bacteria, and the mice achieve some level of sight after a short period of time. Neuroplasticity is crazy.
I kind of doubt that you can do that because blind people still use their visual cortex when they make out the shape of objects by tough, or when they navigate the world, so I would assume the visual cortex is a specialized "hardware".
It strikes me that it's less specialized to processing sensory input from light and more specialized to constructing a model of where things can be expected to be in relation to where the body is. So it's like a proprioceptory map.
It's interesting because I can look around my bathroom in the light, turn the light off, then reach for and grasp EG a toothbrush from memory on the first try without feeling around. It's like the images are a map of where things are and that map doesn't require the sensory images once it's constructed, nor does it require visual stimulation to construct.
Unfortunately I can't find a source to verify this so hoping someone with better knowledge could confirm that this is just how plastic the brain can be?