Centre de Recherche en Neuropsychologie et Cognition, CERNEC, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Prog Brain Res. 2011;191:211-31. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53752-2.00003-5.
The purpose of this review is to consider new sensory rehabilitation avenues in the context of the brain's remarkable ability to reorganize itself following sensory deprivation. Here, deafness and blindness are taken as two illustrative models. Mainly, two promising rehabilitative strategies based on opposing theoretical principles will be considered: sensory substitution and neuroprostheses. Sensory substitution makes use of the remaining intact senses to provide blind or deaf individuals with coded information of the lost sensory system. This technique thus benefits from added neural resources in the processing of the remaining senses resulting from crossmodal plasticity, which is thought to be coupled with behavioral enhancements in the intact senses. On the other hand, neuroprostheses represent an invasive approach aimed at stimulating the deprived sensory system directly in order to restore, at least partially, its functioning. This technique therefore relies on the neuronal integrity of the brain areas normally dedicated to the deprived sense and is rather hindered by the compensatory reorganization observed in the deprived cortex. Here, we stress that our understanding of the neuroplastic changes that occur in sensory-deprived individuals may help guide the design and the implementation of such rehabilitative methods.
本篇综述旨在探讨在大脑具有显著的自组织能力的背景下，新的感觉康复途径，这里以耳聋和失明两种模型为例。主要考虑两种基于相反理论原则的有前途的康复策略：感觉替代和神经假体。感觉替代利用仍然完好的感觉，为失明或失聪个体提供丧失的感觉系统的编码信息。因此，这种技术得益于交叉模态可塑性中处理剩余感觉的额外神经资源，这被认为与完整感觉的行为增强相关联。另一方面，神经假体是一种侵入性方法，旨在直接刺激剥夺感觉系统，以至少部分恢复其功能。因此，这种技术依赖于大脑区域的神经元完整性，这些区域通常专门用于剥夺的感觉，并且受到剥夺皮质中观察到的代偿性重组的阻碍。在这里，我们强调，我们对感觉剥夺个体中发生的神经可塑性变化的理解可能有助于指导这些康复方法的设计和实施。
