To what extent can the senses complement and replace

each other in processing information?

Can visual stimuli be picked up by the ears? Does what we see
affect what we hear and how perceive smell?
I have read this article a while back about the McGurk effect, in
which the auditory component of a sound is paired with the visual
component of another. McGurk published his findings in Hearing Lips and
Seeing Voices", and he finds that often, the perceived phoneme is a third,
intermediate phoneme. As an example, the syllable /ba-ba/ is spoken over
the lip movements of /ga-ga/, and the perception is of /da-da/. This
phenomenon is interesting, as it suggests that multiple sensory inputs are
combined to provide a best guess especially when faced with conflicting
information between sensory inputs. This phenomenon makes me wonder
can this quirk of the human brain be exploited further? Can one sensory
input do the job of another?
In The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See, Michael Finkel
recounts his experiences with a visually impaired man, Kish, who taught
himself to see through echolocation, much like the way bats navigate.
Kish reports having vivid pictures of the world in his head, solely based on
the auditory feedback he gets from constantly clicking his tongue. He
describes his vision as similar to a sonar. Thus, he is able to locate
buildings a thousand feet away and another person six feet away.
In the 1980s, a group of neuroscientists developed a tactile
display, in which 144 electrodes are place on a mouthpiece which can
induce a current against the tongue. It was first used successfully as an
aid for people with an impaired sense of balance due to damage of the
semi-circular canal. From that onwards, the team decided to experiment
with feeding other sensory data to the mouthpiece. It was found that
visual input can also be converted into electrical impulses to the tongue,
where it is processed as tactile input and converted back into visual
information. Blind-folded test subjects report seeing high-contrast images
of the surroundings and could navigate the world with that tactile
information alone.
Then I thought about my own experiences dealing with sensory
information. As I have rather severe short-sightedness in both eyes,
coupled with an equally bad case of astigmatism, the visual information I
get without my glasses on is very noisy and blurry, much like an old TV
with weak reception. One day, my glasses fell off while I was playing
football and my teammate stepped on it, breaking it into two. As the game
continued, I made many errors in tackling and found it hard to locate my
teammates. In the time it took for a new pair of glasses to arrive, I found it

less disorienting to shut off my distorted vision completely at times and

focus on the rest of my senses.
At first, I fooled around with my grandmothers walking stick at
home, using it to locate obstacles to navigate around the house, with
rather encouraging success. At the dining table, with my eyes closed, I
become more aware of the different resistances provided by the different
things on my plate. I could feel my fork going into the thick cuts of
chicken, traversing its fibres and provided a soft landing for my fork while
the long beans provided a more abrupt feedback response as it burst
open. I was able to finish my meal without making too much of a mess, as
while my fork moved around, I could feel its sides pushing against the
vegetables, the sour cream, the chicken and the potatoes.
A day later without glasses, I tried to rely on my sense of hearing to
make sense of the world, without much success. That night, I stood on the
pavement of a main road, with my father who was understandably
frightened when we were about to cross the road. I could not see much at
a distance all I could see was the glare of car lamps heading my way
constantly, and I would have been stuck in my tracks for a long time if
there wasnt anyone to guide me across. While crossing the road, I could
hear the surroundings were slightly quitter than before, as there were less
cars zooming by at that instant. After that, I became aware of the
directional nature of the human hearing, and became more aware of the
chaos in everyday life, where we are bombarded by thousands of
information every instant.
Thus, I wonder if we could live with less senses than five if we
could still be as effective at processing information knowing as we are if
we evolved with fewer senses than we have now. To what extent can the
senses complement and replace each other in processing information?