The remarkable story of this blind piano prodigy is now helping scientists to better understand the human brain.

Matthew Whitaker has been blind since birth. His parents were told that he only had a 50% chance of survival, and he underwent 11 surgeries before he was even two years old.

Despite being faced with these grim odds, he survived his prognosis. Not only that, he exhibited an extraordinary gift for playing the piano since before he could even walk; by the time he was 3 years old, he was playing two-handed piano compositions and writing his own songs without ever having a teacher.

The piano prodigy from Hackensack, New Jersey can now play anything he hears—from Dvorak to Beyonce, his repertoire is immense and fluid.

Dalia Sakas, the director of New York's Filomen M. D'Agostino Greenberg Music School for the Visually Impaired, recalls the moment she decided to take Matthew on as a student when he was five years old, making him the youngest person to ever attend the school.

"I was performing a couple of recitals and the Dvorak Piano Quintet is a piece actually for a piano and string quartet. So there's five of us," Sakas told CBS reporters. "So Matt and his mom came to hear, you know, the night I played. He comes in Saturday morning. I walk into the studio and he's playing the opening of the Dvorak Quintet."

One day after hearing it at the recital, Whitaker was playing this difficult piece of music by ear—all five parts, usually performed by five different people, at the same time.

Now only 18 years old, Whitaker has since toured around the world, headlined prestigious venues from Carnegie Hall to the Kennedy Center, and won a number of music awards.

Such is the height of Whitaker's talent that he caught the attention of Dr. Charles Limb, a neurologist who also happens to be a fellow musician. Dr. Limb was fascinated by what might've been going on inside Whitaker's brain, so with the permission of the musician and his family, Whitaker underwent two MRI exams—first while being exposed to different stimuli, including music, and then while he played on a keyboard.

What Dr. Limb was surprised to find was that Whitaker's brain seemed to have repurposed its own disused visual cortex in order to build other neurological pathways. Even when Whitaker was simply listening to one of his favorite bands, his entire visual cortex lit up.

"It seems like his brain is taking that part of the tissue that's not being stimulated by sight and using it … to perceive music," Limb told CBS News for the 60 Minutes interview. "It's sort of borrowing that part of the brain and rewiring it to help him hear music."

When Dr. Limb presented Whitaker with his brain scans showing how his brain lit up when he listened to music, the musician was amazed.

"I didn't even know that that was happening," Whitaker said. When asked about why he thought his brain was illuminated in such a way, he simply said "I love music."

If you want to hear more of Whitaker's talent for yourself, his music is for sale on Amazon.

(WATCH a quick clip of Whitaker's talent below—or check out the CBS News website to watch the full 13-minute video)

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