Adult brain can change, study confirms

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Drawings of visual objects by a stroke victim known as BL. When a stimulus appears just below BLs blind area the shape elongates upwards and into the blind area. He perceived circles as cigar shaped squares as rectangles and triangles as pencil shape ...
Drawings of visual objects by a stroke victim known as BL. When a stimulus appears just below BL's blind area, the shape elongates upwards and into the blind area. He perceived circles as cigar shaped, squares as rectangles, and triangles as pencil shaped. Graphic courtesy / Daniel Dilks, McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, formerly of Johns Hopkins University

It is well established that a child's brain has a remarkable capacity for change, but controversy continues about the extent to which such plasticity exists in the adult human primary sensory cortex. Now, neuroscientists from MIT and Johns Hopkins University have used converging evidence from brain imaging and behavioral studies to show that the adult visual cortex does indeed reorganize-and that the change affects visual perception. The study appears online Sept. 5 in an advance publication of the Journal of Neuroscience.


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