Principal Investigator Mriganka Sur
We use two model systems to study developmental plasticity and its mechanisms. The first, which we pioneered, involves rewiring the brain: we induce projections from the eye to innervate nonvisual centers, such as the auditory thalamus, early in life. Since visually evoked electrical activity has a different spatial and temporal structure than auditory activity, visual inputs cause the auditory pathway to develop with a very different pattern of inputs than normal. We have demonstrated that this profoundly alters neuronal networks and connectivity in the rewired auditory cortex.