visual cortex

Rapid and reversible recruitment of early visual cortex for touch.

People have been experimenting with using implanted electrodes to stimulate the brain’s visual cortex since the 1970s, and it’s well established that the approach can produce flashes of light on a person’s visual field known as phospenes.

Years ago, my student Don Vaughn and I worked out a model showing that dreaming appears to be a way of keeping the visual cortex defended every night.

By the way, REM sleep happens most in infants because that’s when their brains are really plastic and need to defend the visual cortex the most.

The researchers then used an fMRI to read the visual cortex of human subjects as they looked at or were instructed to imagine the same objects.