Building the Brain in the Dark: Functional and Specific Crossmodal Reorganization in the Occipital Cortex of Blind Individuals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction The brain has long been considered as being hard wired in a predetermined manner shaped by evolution. This view has been challenged in the past decades by increasing evidence documenting the impressive capacity of the brain to be modulated through learning and experience, even well into adulthood. Pioneering studies of Hubel and Wiesel (1963; Hubel et al., 1977) on the development of ocular dominance columns have compellingly demonstrated that alterations in visual experience can influence the normal development of the visual cortex. One of the most striking demonstrations of experience-dependent plasticity comes from studies in congenitally blind individuals (CB) showing dramatic cortical reorganizations as a consequence of visual deprivation. Experiments have documented that cortical sensory maps in the remaining senses of CB can expand with experience. For instance, finger representation in the somatosensory cortex is increased in blind individuals who are proficient Braille readers (Pascual-Leone et al., 1993; Sterr et al., 1999), and the tonotopic map in the auditory cortex is larger in visually deprived individuals (Elbert et al., 2002). Such cortical changes are thought to underlie enhanced reading abilities and auditory processing skills in the blind (Elbert et al., 2002; Sterr et al., 1998). Aside from these examples of intramodal plasticity, massive crossmodal changes have been reported in the occipital cortex deprived of its natural visual inputs. In people born blind, occipital regions thatwould normally process visual stimuli are “hijacked” by the other senses as these regions become responsive to nonvisual input (Bavelier and Neville, 2002; Pascual-Leone et al., 2005).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".