ABSTRACT
Normally, sensory processing is organized in a modular fashion with sensory information passing from the relevant sensory organ (whether it be retina or cochlea) to a hierarchy of specialized cortical regions which process increasingly complex attributes of the incoming sensory information. But when a sense is lost, especially early in life, significant cortical reorganization is observed. A large body of research has begun to describe the positive aspects of this reorganization, characterizing how processing of the remaining intact senses may adapt to compensate for the missing sense. However, though less studied, neural reorganization also has potential negative effects, resulting in a gradual deterioration in the ability to process the missing sense.
