The mammalian nervous system can adapt to the challenges of life through neural plasticity. The brain will undergo extensive reorganization following sensory deprivation or damage to afferent pathways (Kaas, 2001). This plastic reorganization develops as a function of time. A recent review on plasticity in the blind (Lazzouni and Lepore, 2014) stressed the importance of critical periods and the...

Health care professionals assume that tube feeding is an unpleasant, distressing experience for patients, which is only partially substantiated by experience. Thirty patients were interviewed via a tube feeding and hospital experience checklist (a 47-item interview schedule). Common experiences were operationally defined as those felt by at least 50%; subjectively distressful experiences were t...

Several theories have proposed a functional role for synchronous neuronal firing in generating the neural code of a sensory perception. Synchronous neural activity develops during a critical postnatal period of cortical maturation, and severely reducing neural activity in a sensory pathway during this period could interfere with the development of coincident discharge among cortical neurons. Lo...

How homeostatic processes contribute to map plasticity and stability in sensory cortex is not well-understood. Classically, sensory deprivation first drives rapid Hebbian weakening of spiking responses to deprived inputs, which is followed days later by a slow homeostatic increase in spiking responses mediated by excitatory synaptic scaling. Recently, more rapid homeostasis by inhibitory circui...

The simple nervous system of the nematode C. elegans consists of 302 neurons with highly reproducible morphologies, suggesting a hard-wired program of axon guidance. Surprisingly, we show here that sensory activity shapes sensory axon morphology in C. elegans. A class of mutants with deformed sensory cilia at their dendrite endings have extra axon branches, suggesting that sensory deprivation d...

When one sense is unavailable, sensory responsibilities shift and processing of the remaining modalities becomes enhanced to compensate for missing information. This shift, referred to as compensatory plasticity, results in a unique sensory experience for individuals who are deaf, including the manner in which music is perceived. This paper evaluates the neural, behavioural and cognitive eviden...

An important unresolved question in sensory neuroscience is whether, and if so with what time course, tactile perception is enhanced by visual deprivation. In three experiments involving 158 normally sighted human participants, we assessed whether tactile spatial acuity improves with short-term visual deprivation over periods ranging from under 10 to over 110 minutes. We used an automated, prec...

Layer 6 (L6) of primary sensory cortices is distinct from other layers in that it provides a major cortical input to primary sensory thalamic nuclei. L6 pyramidal neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) send projections to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), as well as to the thalamic reticular nucleus and higher order thalamic nuclei. Although L6 neurons are proposed to modulate the activi...

A new generation of multimodal interfaces and interactions is emerging. Drawing on the principles Sensory Substitution Augmentation Devices (SSADs), these offer potential for rich, immersive human-computer interactions, but are difficult to design well, take time master, creating significant barriers towards wider adoption. Following a review literature surrounding existing SSADs, their metrics...

During the early postnatal age environmental signals underlie development of sensory systems. The visual system is considered as an appropriate system for evaluation of the role of sensory experience in postnatal development of sensory systems. In this study we evaluated the effect of visual deprivation on the usage of visuospatial cues in navigation of radial arm maze. Light (LR) and dark rear...