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COMPENSATION. “For example, after early visual deprivation due to retinitis pigmentosa, touch stimuli can produce visual phosphenes, and after loss of tactile sensation from a thalamic lesion, sounds can elicit touch sensations. More remarkably, arm amputees experience touch in the phantom limb merely by watching another person's hand being touched.” https://lnkd.in/dfc7eju View in LinkedIn

EDGE OF NORMAL CURVE. “Another possible explanation is that synesthesia simply represents the tail end of a normal distribution of cross-modality interactions present in the general population. Partial evidence supporting this idea comes as sensory deprivation and deafferentation (i.e., loss of sensory input through the destruction of sensory nerve fibers) can lead to synesthetic-like experiences.” https://lnkd.in/dfc7eju View in LinkedIn

THE DREADED SPANDREL. “Before asking why a synesthesia gene might have been preserved through evolution, one first must consider the possibility that synesthesia may likely be merely epiphenomenal, and that the gene(s) involved may have served some totally unrelated purpose. It is also possible that the gene(s) may have been retained simply because they did not incur a great enough cost to be purged by selection, and could be an example of an evolutionary spandrel.” https://lnkd.in/dfc7eju View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend and concludes this weekend on the topic of synesthesia. In this section, the idea that crossed wires in the brain (i.e., smells becoming sounds) can lead to enhanced functionality (such as memory) is explored. Is the human brain functioning at maximal capacity, or is there an untapped endogenous reserve? What will the natural evolution of the brain lead to in the future? Is exogenous enhancement the only way to increase capacity? View in LinkedIn

BROAD PROOF-OF-CONCEPT. "Transplanted interneurons have been shown to modify disease phenotypes in several rodent models of neurologic and psychiatric disorders, including epilepsy, chronic pain, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, and anxiety." https://lnkd.in/dfXR-Jt View in LinkedIn

PROMISING RESULTS. "Studies in animal models of Parkinson's disease (PD) and Huntington's disease (HD) show that transplanted human neural precursor cells survive and differentiate into neurons and glia." http://www.pnas.org/content/101/32/11839.full View in LinkedIn

LEAP FORWARD. "The field of stem-cell biology has been catapulted forward by the startling development of reprogramming technology. The ability to restore pluripotency to somatic cells through the ectopic co-expression of reprogramming factors has created powerful new opportunities for modelling human diseases and offers hope for personalized regenerative cell therapies." https://lnkd.in/dMmyqzS View in LinkedIn

EXPANDED ENQUIRY. "More recently, a host of cell types have been tested in stroke models, including human bone marrow cells, human umbilical cord blood cells, rat trophic factor-secreting kidney cells, and immortalized cell lines such as the human neuron-like NT2N (hNT) cells and MHP36, an embryonic murine immortalized neuroepithelial cell line." http://www.pnas.org/content/101/32/11839.full View in LinkedIn

FUTURE PATH. "Fetal brain tissue transplants have been shown to produce some recovery in animal models of stroke." http://www.pnas.org/content/101/32/11839.full View in LinkedIn

ENHANCED PERCEPTION. “Outside the realm of memory research there is accumulating evidence of enhanced sensory processing in synesthesia as well. Specifically, grapheme-color synesthetes show enhanced detection of colors on a perceptually low-level visual test of parvocellular processing paralleled by the finding of differences in early visual processes to simple colors using visual-evoked potentials well before the time period in the brain in which synesthesia engages.” https://lnkd.in/dfc7eju View in LinkedIn