Séminaire COSY: Building the mind/brain in the dark.

IONS

Le Pr Olivier COLLIGNON (IoNS/COSY) présentera le 6 novembre un séminaire sur la plasticité neuronale chez le sujet aveugle.

 

Ce séminaire (invitation) se déroulera dans l'auditoire Socrate - 242, de 12h30 à 13h30 sur le campus de Louvain-la-Neuve (UCL) et s'inscrit dans le cadre du cycle de séminaires 2015-2016 organisé par le pôle COSY.

ABSTRACT : I will first briefly demonstrate how blindness represents a compelling model to study the role vision plays in the development of lower- (eg space) and higher- (eg number/time) cognitive abilities. Then I will illustrate how neuroimaging studies involving blind individuals have the potential to shed new light on the old ‘nature versus nurture’ debate on brain development: while the recruitment of occipital (visual) regions by non-visual inputs in blind individuals highlights the ability of the brain to remodel itself due to experience (nurture influence), the observation of specialized cognitive modules in the reorganized occipital cortex of the blinds, similar to those observed in the sighted, highlights the intrinsic constraints imposed to such plasticity (nature influence). These reorganizations in the occipital cortex of blind individuals raise crucial challenges for sight-restoration. Recently, we had the unique opportunity to track the behavioral and neurophysiological changes taking place in the occipital cortex of an early and severely visually impaired patient before as well as after sight restoration. An in-deep study of this exceptional patient highlighted the dynamic nature of the occipital cortex facing visual deprivation and restoration. Finally, I will present some data demonstrating that even a short and transient period of visual deprivation (only few weeks) during the early sensitive period of brain development leads to enduring large-scale crossmodal reorganization of the brain circuitry typically dedicated to vision, even years after visual inputs.

Publié le 20 novembre 2015