ArticleNature communications2019
A thalamocortical pathway for fast rerouting of tactile information to occipital cortex in congenital blindness.
Article in Nature communications, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural substrates of spatial processing and navigation in blindness: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- The reading brain - Transforming vision into language.Progress in neurobiology · 2026Review
- Pathways of Cross-Modal Access to the Visual Cortex in Late Blindness.Research square · 2026Article
- A Bioinspired Perceptual Sensor for Spatiotemporal Decoding of Haptic and Pain Stimuli in Prostheses.Cyborg and bionic systems (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Exploring Deep Magnetoencephalography via Thalamo-Cortical Sleep Spindles.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Alpha oscillations mediate inhibitory control and perceptual transitions during binocular rivalry.iScience · 2025Article
- Similar Computational Hierarchies for Reading and Speech in the Occipital Cortex of Sighed and Blind: Converging Evidence from fMRI and Chronometric TMS.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Memory and Representation of Vision-Related Verbs in Early Blind Individuals.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- The cost of language: functionally over-dominant language circuits in the human brain may limit cognitive abilities and non-verbal executive functions.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Human Auditory-Motor Networks Show Frequency-Specific Phase-Based Coupling in Resting-State MEG.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- The transformation of sensory to perceptual braille letter representations in the visually deprived brain.eLife · 2024Article
- Spatiotemporal whole-brain activity and functional connectivity of melodies recognition.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Sound suppresses earliest visual cortical processing after sight recovery in congenitally blind humans.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Mental Imagery in Dreams of Congenitally Blind People.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Reorganization of thalamocortical connections in congenitally blind humans.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Age-related changes of deep-brain neurophysiological activity.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Visuo-spatial imagery in dreams of congenitally and early blind: a systematic review.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2023Review
- Altered Regional Homogeneity in Patients With Congenital Blindness: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Face shape processingFrontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Lemniscal Corticothalamic Feedback in Auditory Scene Analysis.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
In congenitally blind individuals, the occipital cortex responds to various nonvisual inputs. Some animal studies raise the possibility that a subcortical pathway allows fast re-routing of tactile information to the occipital cortex, but this has not been shown in humans. Here we show using magnetoencephalography (MEG) that tactile stimulation produces occipital cortex activations, starting as early as 35 ms in congenitally blind individuals, but not in blindfolded sighted controls. Given our measured thalamic response latencies of 20 ms and a mean estimated lateral geniculate nucleus to primary visual cortex transfer time of 15 ms, we claim that this early occipital response is mediated by a direct thalamo-cortical pathway. We also observed stronger directed connectivity in the alpha band range from posterior thalamus to occipital cortex in congenitally blind participants. Our results strongly suggest the contribution of a fast thalamo-cortical pathway in the cross-modal activation of the occipital cortex in congenitally blind humans.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.