Study: To see what’s right in front of you, your brain may need some rewiring — (Details)



“Some connections in brain are fixed after a period in early life, known as the critical period,” says Gilbert, the Arthur and Jane Ross Professor of Neurosciences and Behavior. “Others are changing throughout life, and play an important role in encoding information in our brain as we encounter new experiences.”

Perceiving is believing

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on perceptual learning, a process that involves tuning the senses to better perceive the subtleties of various sights, sounds, and smells. Most of the time, we’re not aware that we’ve become better at distinguishing between two different shapes, for instance; but over time, with repeated exposure, this type of unconscious learning indeed takes place.



What’s more, disruptions to that mechanism could underlie some brain disorders, Gilbert says. “This type of neuronal flexibility happens in areas outside of perception,” he notes. “So if that mechanism gets disturbed, it may account for behavioral disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.”

Can you see it?

To test whether remodeling occurs in brain regions devoted to vision, Gilbert and his colleagues challenged two macaque monkeys to perceive elements of order within otherwise disordered scenes. During experiments, the monkeys viewed two pictures side by side. Both contained a frenzy of dashes, but in one image some of these dashes came together to form a cohesive line. The monkeys’ task was to identify the line — and the fewer dashes it contained, the harder it was to spot.


“The animal didn’t need a reward to move his eye in the direction of the image that contained a line,” says Gilbert. “Just by doing the same task over and over, he improved.”


“We’ve always known the brain needs some degree of plasticity through adulthood so that we can acquire new memories,” says Gilbert. “But it turns out that plasticity is more ubiquitous than we initially thought.”



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