A friend sent me this link today: Gene Therapy Makes Near-Blind Patients See by Strengthening Neural Connections

If you don't want to read the whole thing, I'll summarize the points I think are most important:

1. "Gene therapy restored vision to blind patients by strengthening visual pathways from the retina, through the brain’s white matter, into the brain’s visual cortex...
2. It doesn't matter how old you are, your brain can learn new things by making new pathways, by learning new things, etc.
3. "The Ashtari study advances basic science knowledge on two fronts. “First, most of what we know about brain plasticity comes from animal studies. This research is extremely important, but clearly the human brain differs greatly from brains of experimental animals. "