CHAPTER 27 - Blindness and Consciousness: New Light from the Dark
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Compensatory plasticity and cross-modal reorganization following early visual deprivation
2014, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsMind the blind brain to understand the sighted one! Is there a supramodal cortical functional architecture?
2014, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsCitation Excerpt :Furthermore, these studies in congenitally blind individuals have been instrumental to understand to what extent visual experience is a mandatory prerequisite for the brain to develop its morphological and functional organization within these “visual” cortical regions. At the same time, if a given feature is also present in sighted individuals, its functional recruitment in congenitally blind individuals has to reflect a more abstract, supramodal representation of a specific content of information, either structurally or semantically, and cannot be simply a consequence of a plastic rearrangement due to the lack of vision (Pietrini et al., 2004, 2009; Ricciardi and Pietrini, 2011). To date, several perceptual, cognitive and, more recently, affective domains have been explored in congenitally blind individuals by combining functional brain imaging methodologies with distinct experimental paradigms.
High-resolution fMRI detects neuromodulation of individual brainstem nuclei by electrical tongue stimulation in balance-impaired individuals
2011, NeuroImageCitation Excerpt :This route to the brain was originally used for sensory substitution in both balance-impaired and blind individuals (Chebat et al., 2007; Danilov and al., 2006; Robinson et al., 2009; Tyler et al., 2003; Vuillerme et al., 2008; Vuillerme and Cuisinier, 2009). Cross-modal recruitment theories of plasticity can explain why individuals using the tongue stimulation for sensory substitution show improvement in behavioral tasks (Collignon et al., 2009; Pietrini et al., 2009; Poirier et al., 2007; Ptito et al., 2005). One important observation of some balance studies was that the beneficial effects were sustained, lasting days to weeks beyond the final stimulation session (Danilov et al., 2006; Tyler et al., 2003).
Neural correlates of olfactory processing in congenital blindness
2011, NeuropsychologiaCitation Excerpt :Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the purported role of olfactory brain areas and the occipital cortex in olfactory processing in subjects lacking vision from birth. In light of previous findings on cross-modal plasticity in early blindness (Pietrini et al., 2009), we hypothesized that besides the primary and higher order olfactory brain areas, blind subjects will also recruit their visual cortex during odor detection. Eleven congenitally blind subjects without light perception (4 females; mean age: 32 ± 14 years; mean education: 13 ± 2 years) and fourteen sighted controls (8 females; mean age: 30 ± 9 years; mean education: 16y ± 2 years) participated in this study.