Younger brains are easier to rewire
About a decade ago, scientists studying the brains of blind people made a surprising discovery: A brain region normally devoted to processing images had been rewired to interpret tactile information, such as input from the fingertips as they trace Braille letters. Subsequent experiments revealed a similar phenomenon in other brain regions. However, these studies didn’t answer the question of whether the brain can rewire itself at any time, or only very early in life. A new paper from MIT neuroscientists, in collaboration with Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, offers evidence that it is easier to rewire the brain early in life. The researchers found that a small part of the brain’s visual cortex that processes motion became reorganized only in the brains of subjects who had been born blind, not those who became blind later in life. The new findings, described in the Oct. 14 issue of...