The mature brain rewires in response to sensory deprivation

Evidence

Lee et al. ( 2003 ) used positron emission tomography (PET) to compare resting-state activity in 9 profoundly deaf individuals and 9 age-matched normal-hearing controls. They found that glucose metabolism in some auditory areas was lower than in normally-hearing people, but significantly increased with duration of deafness, and concluded that plasticity occurs in the sensory-deprived mature brain. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4273

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does glucose metabolism rising with deafness duration index compensatory plasticity or purely metabolic down-regulation reversal? Worth chasing the underlying PET literature.