COcOAB · Characterizing the Occipital Oscillatory Activity in Blindness

Characterizing the Occipital Oscillatory Activity in Blindness

The massive reorganization of the occipital regions as a consequence of lack of vision represents one of the most remarkable examples of the plastic potentialities of the human brain. Despite the large amount of neuroimaging evidence proving the involvement of occipital areas of blind individuals in non-visual input processing (i.e., auditory, tactile), the functional role of this sensory reorganized region is still matter of intense debate. The goal of COcOAB (Characterizing the Occipital Oscillatory Activity in Blindness) is to use the magnetoencephalography (MEG) technique to assess the functional characteristics of the neuronal activity within the occipital cortex in blind humans. Moreover, COcOAB aims to investigate the interactions between this region and the rest of the brain, to address whether the visual cortex is integrated into new functional networks to serve non-visual functions. The functional profile of these areas are assessed in relation with the onset timing of visual loss, thus contributing to assess the differential impact of visual deprivation occurring at different stages of development. My goal is to prove that we can predict whether a faint sound will be heard or not by a blind individual by analyzing both the modulation of the local occipital activity and the long-range communication of this area with other brain regions — in particular, those areas involved in auditory perception. This result would be in support to the assumption that these effects are not just epiphenomenal, but play a causal role in auditory perception, is provided. In this way, COcOAB contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms subtending crossmodal plasticity, sheding light on how the brain machinery dinamically reorganizes to face challenges occurring during development.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union