The shift in X/Y ratio after chronic monocular paralysis: a binocularly mediated, barbiturate-sensitive effect in the adult lateral geniculate nucleus.

Adult-onset stimulus modifications, such as monocular paralysis, alter the physiology of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), reducing the encounter rate for X-latency cells in all of the principal layers of both LGNs whether the innervating eye is paralyzed or mobile. These reductions in encounter rate for X-latency cells are confined to those portions of the LGN representing central binocular visual space and are sensitive to the level of anesthesia in that, while these effects are evident in subjects sedated during recording, no such reductions are found when subjects are anesthetized with sodium pentobarbital during recording. Finally, conduction velocity and receptive field classification data from these experiments confirm, as the shifts in OX latency distributions would indicate, that chronic monocular paralysis does have a selective impact upon the recordability of LGN X-cells. These observations together with earlier ones involving monocular paralysis suggest that this adult-onset modification reduces the encounter rate for X-cells by disrupting a binocular mechanism which controls the relative excitability of X- and Y-cells which represent central visual space.