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Plasticity and its limits

How much can the adult brain compensate for injury to the senses of touch or vision, for example? The answer from the latest results on the visual system, involving damage to the retina, seems to be ‘very little’.

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Figure 1: Representation of fingers in the monkey somatosensory cortex.

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Sereno, M. Plasticity and its limits. Nature 435, 288–289 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/435288a

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