title: Are Supramodality and Cross-Modal Plasticity the Yin and Yang of Brain Development? From Blindness to Rehabilitation.
abstract: Research in blind individuals has primarily focused for a long time on the brain plastic reorganization that occurs in early visual areas. Only more recently, scientists have developed innovative strategies to understand to what extent vision is truly a mandatory prerequisite for the brain's fine morphological architecture to develop and function. As a whole, the studies conducted to date in sighted and congenitally blind individuals have provided ample evidence that several "visual" cortical areas develop independently from visual experience and do process information content regardless of the sensory modality through which a particular stimulus is conveyed: a property namedsupramodality. At the same time, lack of vision leads to a structural and functional reorganization within "visual" brain areas, a phenomenon known ascross-modal plasticity. Cross-modal recruitment of the occipital cortex in visually deprived individuals represents an adaptative compensatory mechanism that mediates processing of non-visual inputs. Supramodality and cross-modal plasticity appears to be the "yin and yang" of brain development:supramodalis what takes placedespitethe lack of vision, whereascross-modalis what happensbecause oflack of vision. Here we provide a critical overview of the research in this field and discuss the implications that these novel findings have for the development of educative/rehabilitation approaches and sensory substitution devices (SSDs) in sensory-impaired individuals.
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgical, Medical, Molecular Pathology and Critical Care, University of PisaPisa, Italy; Clinical Psychology Branch, Pisa University HospitalPisa, Italy.
authors.forename: Luca
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cecchetti
authors.affiliation: BRAINlab, Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology, Panum Institute, University of CopenhagenCopenhagen, Denmark; Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Yale UniversityNew Haven, CT, USA.
authors.forename: Ron
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kupers
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Neuropsychiatry, Psychiatric Centre CopenhagenCopenhagen, Denmark; School of Optometry, Université de MontréalMontréal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Maurice
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ptito
authors.affiliation: MOMILab, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca Lucca, Italy.
authors.forename: Pietro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Pietrini
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgical, Medical, Molecular Pathology and Critical Care, University of PisaPisa, Italy; MOMILab, IMT School for Advanced Studies LuccaLucca, Italy.
authors.forename: Emiliano
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ricciardi
keywords: MRI; blindness; crossmodal; fMRI; rehabilitation; sensory substitution; supramodal