Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bedny, Marina

Titel

Evidence from Blindness for a Cognitively Pluripotent Cortex

Ist Teil von

• Trends in cognitive sciences, 2017-09, Vol.21 (9), p.637-648

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Cognitive neuroscience seeks to discover how cognitive functions are implemented in neural circuits. Studies of plasticity in blindness suggest that this mind–brain mapping is highly flexible during development. In blindness, ‘visual’ cortices take on higher-cognitive functions, including language and mathematics, becoming sensitive to the grammatical structure of spoken sentences and the difficulty of math equations. Visual cortex activity at rest becomes synchronized with higher-cognitive networks. Such repurposing is striking in light of the cognitive and evolutionary differences between vision, language, and mathematics. We propose that human cortices are cognitively pluripotent, that is, capable of assuming a wide range of cognitive functions. Specialization is driven by input during development, which is itself constrained by connectivity and experience. ‘The child who methodically adds two numbers from right to left, carrying a digit when necessary, may be using the same algorithm that is implemented by the wires and transistors of the cash register in the neighborhood supermarket…’ ▓▓Vision, 1982, David Marr In blindness, visual cortices are recruited during processing of written and spoken language. Activity is modulated by semantic and grammatical properties of language stimuli and is relevant to higher-cognitive behavior. In blindness, visual cortices participate in multiple distinct higher-cognitive functions, including numerical processing and memory. Different subregions of visual cortices are specialized for distinct higher-cognitive functions. Blindness leads to increased connectivity between different subnetworks within visual cortices and distinct higher-cognitive frontoparietal networks. ‘Visual’ regions that participate in language processing are correlated with frontoparietal language networks, whereas those active during number tasks are correlated with the frontoparietal number network.