Neural Reorganization Following Sensory Loss: The Opportunity Of Change

By Lotfi B. Merabet, Alvaro Pascual-Leone. 2009

738 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is growing evidence that sensory deprivation is associated with crossmodal neuroplastic changes in the brain. After visual or auditory deprivation, brain areas that are normally associated with the lost sense are recruited by spared sensory modalities. These changes underlie adaptive and compensatory behaviours in blind and deaf individuals. Although there are differences between these populations owing to the nature of the deprived sensory modality, there seem to be common principles regarding how the brain copes with sensory loss and the factors that influence neuroplastic changes. Here, we discuss crossmodal neuroplasticity with regards to behavioural adaptation after sensory deprivation and highlight the possibility of maladaptive consequences within the context of rehabilitation.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Early Experience & Multisensory Perceptual Narrowing (2014, background): “The mechanisms that underlie these effects are currently not known, but it is known that blindness and deafness lead to an invasion of the cortical areas that normally respond to the missing input by the remaining intact modalities (Bavelier & Neville, 2002; Merabet & Pascual-Leone, 2010).”
Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation (2019, background): “Blind individuals may exhibit enhanced perceptual abilities to compensate for the loss of vision [89, 64].”
Functional connectivity of visual cortex in the blind follows retinotopic organization principles (2015, background): “Furthermore, full visual deprivation causes visual areas to reorganize to process other inputs and sensory modalities (Merabet and Pascual-Leone, 2010; Voss and Zatorre, 2012).”
The origins of metamodality in visual object area LO: Bodily topographical biases and increased functional connectivity to S1 (2016, positive): “…which show that various visual areas can be recruited in a task specific manner by non-visual inputs (Amedi et al., 2007; Matteau et al., 2010; Merabet and Pascual-Leone, 2010; Ptito et al., 2012; Reich et al., 2011; Renier et al., 2010; Striem-Amit and Amedi, 2014; Striem-Amit et al., 2012a).”
Reading with sounds: sensory substitution selectively activates the visual word form area in the blind. (2012, background): “The scope of this reorganization is such that the visual cortex of the blind ‘‘switches tasks’’ and processes nonvisual functions that differ considerably from those typical of the sighted brain, such as memory and language in the primary visual cortex (Amedi et al., 2003; Bedny et al., 2011; see re”
Bayesian Computation Emerges in Generic Cortical Microcircuits through Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (2013, methodology): “Furthermore in the case of sensory deprivation (see [106]) our model predicts that neurons that used to encode stimuli which no longer occur will start to participate in the encoding of other stimuli.”