NORIMOTO AND IKEGAYACoupling a geomagnetic compass with stimulating electrodes implanted in the visual cortex allowed rats whose eyelids had been stitched shut to navigate mazes as efficiently as their sighted counterparts. The results, published today (April 2) in Current Biology, suggest that the adult mammalian brain, once thought to be fairly inflexible, can adapt to an entirely new sensory modality.
“It was very clever and a very good example of the extremes of plasticity that are available in the adult mammalian cortex,” said Eric Thomson, a researcher in the Miguel Nicolelis lab at Duke University who did not participate in the study. “It’s another verification that if you make the information available to the brain, the brain is smart enough to make use of that information in an adaptive way.”
“This is an elegant demonstration of the brain’s capacity to incorporate totally new senses,” David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who was also not involved in the research, told The Scientist in an e-mail.
Understanding one’s place in his environment is key to successful navigation, and without an ability ...
