The cerebral cortex, the outer portion of the brain, consists of a layered structure of neural tissue that contains the cell bodies of neurons and plays a key role in perception and cognition. Although cortical circuits throughout the brain share similarities, the patterns of connections among neurons in different brain regions can vary widely. Yet, relatively little is known about how region-s...

Olfactory bulbs retain the ability to acquire new neurons throughout life. Unilateral olfactory deprivation during the first postnatal month in rats results in a dramatic reduction in the size of the experimental olfactory bulb. Part of this reduction is attributable to the death of neurons and glia. To examine the regenerative capacity of the juvenile olfactory bulb, we developed a technique f...

G>TROWTH in any field of science is almost always uneven. The past decade, for example, has been a period of turbulent growth in the field of perception, a period in which parallel inquiries in neurophysiology, physics, and psychology have each in turn thrown light upon the nature of the perceptual process, light of such an order as to dazzle us all a bit with respect to the fundamental nature ...

Dormal G, Collignon O. Functional selectivity in sensory-deprived cortices. J Neurophysiol 105: 2627–2630, 2011. First published March 23, 2011; doi:10.1152/jn.00109.2011.—In a recent study, Lomber, Meredith, and Kral (2010) investigated crossmodal reorganization in congenitally deaf cats. They demonstrated that specific regions of the auditory cortex are responsible for distinct supranormal vi...

People tend to use the same door every time they enter and exit a building. When certain entrances are widely preferred over others, congestion can occur. This paper describes two interventions to persuade visitors to use another entrance. The first intervention used sensory deprivation (darkness), and the second used guidance paths. The first intervention on sensory deprivation had the expecte...

Plasticity in the human and animal brain is the rule, the base for development, and the way to deal effectively with the environment for making the most efficient use of all the senses. When the brain is deprived of one sensory modality, plasticity becomes compensatory: the exception that invalidates the general loss hypothesis giving the opportunity of effective change. Sensory deprivation com...

We examined the visual and cognitive functions of a 72-year-old subject, KP, who recovered his sight after 53 years of visual deprivation. We used visual evoked potentials (VEPs) to pattern-reversal and motion-onset stimuli and cognitive responses (ERPs) during the oddball paradigm to assess the effect of long-term deprivation on a mature visual system. KP lost his sight at the age of 17 years,...

Sensory experience orchestrates the development of cortical circuitry by adaptively modifying neurotransmission and synaptic connectivity. However, the mechanisms underlying these experience-dependent modifications remain elusive. Here we demonstrate that visual experience suppresses a presynaptic NMDA receptor (preNMDAR)-mediated form of timing-dependent long-term depression (tLTD) at visual c...