  Finally, recent studies of cortical plasticity have shown that even the most plausible candidates for innate specification — such as the use of visual cortex for vision or the use of auditory cortex for hearing — exhibit high degrees of experience-dependent plasticity. For example, in congenitally blind subjects, the areas of the brain normally used for seeing are taken over for the processing of Braille (Sadato et al. 1996; Hamilton and Pascual-Leone, 1998) and even in those with late-onset blindness, significant ‘rewiring’ of visual cortex for other perceptual tasks is apparent (Kujala et al. 1997). Likewise, in the congenitally deaf, auditory cortex is used for the processing of sign language (Nishimura et al. 1999, von Melchner, Pallas and Sur 2000). (See Shimojo and Shams 2001, for a review.)