Auditory cortex nearly identical in hearing and deaf people
The neural architecture in the auditory cortex — the part of the brain that processes sound — is virtually identical in profoundly deaf and hearing people, a new study has found. The study raises a host of new questions about the role of experience in processing sensory information, and could point the way toward potential new avenues for intervention in deafness. The study is described in a June 18 paper published in Scientific Reports. The paper was written by Ella Striem-Amit, a postdoctoral researcher in Alfonso Caramazza’s Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory at Harvard, Mario Belledonne from Harvard, Jorge Almeida from the University of Coimbra, and Quanjing Chen, Yuxing Fang, Zaizhu Han, and Yanchao Bi from Beijing Normal University. “One reason this is interesting is because we don’t know what causes the brain to organize the way it does,” said Striem-Amit, the lead author. “How important is each person’s experience for their brain development? In...