Brain Plasticity in Blind Subjects Centralizes Beyond the Modal Cortices.

ABSTRACT: It is well established that the human brain reorganizes following sensory deprivations. In blind individuals, visual processing regions including the lateral occipital cortex (LOC) are activated by auditory and tactile stimuli as demonstrated by neurophysiological and neuroimaging investigations. The mechanisms for such plasticity remain unclear, but shifts in connectivity across existing neural networks appear to play a critical role. The majority of research efforts to date have focused on neuroplastic changes within visual unimodal regions, however we hypothesized that neuroplastic alterations may also occur in brain networks beyond the visual cortices including involvement of multimodal integration regions and heteromodal cortices. In this study, two recently developed graph-theory bas

SUBMITTER: Ortiz-Teran L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4937754 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature