Cognitive neuroscience of sensory deprivation

Blind! What of that? Man has five senses; if he loses one, the vital energy on which it fed goes to intensify the other four. He had five arrows in his quiver; well, he has shot one away, and four remain. My dear, an enemy is not disarmed because he’s lost one arrow out of five.

 

[William Schwenck Gilbert – Pygmalion and Galatea]

Multisensory Integration (MSI)

The brain is constantly bombarded of sensory signals. For optimal interaction with the world, the brain needs to seamlessly integrate or segregate those inputs depending on the fact that they belong or not to the same event. In the CPP-lab, we try to understand what are the guiding principles behind multisensory integration, with the core hypothesis that the functional goals of brain regions determines how sensory systems links together: same functions, same connections.