🚀 go-pugleaf

As far as the cortical remapping there is a large amount
of animal research looking at the remapping of
visual, auditory, and somatosensory areas after peripheral
receptor damage.

I wrote a paper that goes over some of the auditory
remapping studies at
http://www.utdallas.edu/~dybala/

but just look in MEDLINE under
cortex & plasticity and you will get a bunch of stuff


meijer (meijer@natlab.research.philips.com) wrote:
> I enjoyed reading Raymond Chamberlin's polemic discussion
> about the state of affairs in synesthetic research, and
> sympathise with a number of the more basic issues he 
> implicitly puts forward, although perhaps I would have 
> used different wordings.

> I'd like to see the synesthesia subject drawn out of the 
> current largely phenomenological approach describing only
> exotic spontaneous cases of synesthesia. Though these are
> very interesting, at least as interesting is the question
> to what extent synesthesia can be induced, learnt, whatever,
> by the ``average'' human being. Which neural pathways could
> contribute, what level of brain plasticity is needed, what
> does this mean for adults versus young children, etc.

> I would like to see more experimental work, e.g., how does
> distribution of (human or animal) brain activity gradually 
> change after mapping inputs for one sense to another sense 
> while blocking the inputs to that one sense. Are the cortical 
> or other brain areas normally associated with this one sense 
> gradually going to respond to the remapped sensory inputs of 
> the other sense? And if so, how, and to what degree compared 
> to their normal functioning for the original normal sensory
> inputs?

> A bit hard to follow perhaps in these general terms?

> Remember how well the brain appeared able to adapt in 
> the classic experiments with image reversal goggles. 
> Remember also how the brain activity of trained musicians
> has been shown to differ from that of musical laymen 
> while listening to music. Is the processing of different 
> senses in the brain really so strongly split (through 
> missing neural pathways) as to make cross-modal remappings 
> inevitably fail where unimodal remappings succeed? What
> evidence is there, both pro and con?

> Say one maps, one way or the other, visual information
> into an acoustical form (while preserving much visual 
> information), and blindfolds the subject: what is going
> to happen to brain activity during training? If something
> does happen, can that be explained from (knowledge about)
> existing neural wiring plus some degree of plasticity? 
> Maybe others know still better questions to ask, but at 
> least let's try to get into scientifically reproducible 
> results that might pertain to a better understanding of 
> the workings of  ``normal'' brains (I hope words like 
> ``normal'' don't sound or smell offensive to synesthetes
> reading this, as it isn't meant to).

> Peter Meijer

> Artificial Synesthesia
> http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/asynesth.htm

--
Thank you for your support,
Paul Dybala
dybala@utdallas.edu
http://www.utdallas.edu/~dybala