Dr. Poppy Crum

And I read this paper by a professor at Stanford named Erik Knudsen.

And Erik Knudsen did these amazing, well, he did a lot of seminal work for how we understand the auditory pathways, as well as how we form multisensory objects and the way the brain integrates

You know, cells, data across our modalities, meaning, you know, sight and sound.

But in this paper, what he was doing was he had identified cells in the brain that optimally responded.

There were receptive fields, you know, receptive field being that sort of like...

In all of that giant data set of the world, it's that, you know, it's the set of data that optimally causes that cell to respond.

And for these cells, they cared about a particular location in auditory and visual space, which, you know, frankly, for mammals, we don't have the same sort of like cells because we can move our eyes back and forth in our sockets, unlike owls.

And he studied owls.

And owls have a very hardwired map of auditory visual space.

You turn your head.

It triggers a different vestibular ocular response that moves all of that.

Yes.

But in this case, he had these beautiful hardwired maps of auditory visual space.

And then he would rear and raise these owls with prism glasses that effectively shifted their visual system by 15 degrees.

And then he would put them, key to developing neuroplasticity, he would put them in high, you know, important...

high, not stress, but let's say situations where they had to do something critical to their survival or their well-being.

And so they would hunt and they would feed and do things like that with this 15-degree shift.

And consequently, he saw the cells, the auditory neurons, he saw their dendrites realign to the now

15-degree visually shifted cells.

And it was this realization that they developed a secondary map that was now aligned with the 15-degree shift of the PRISM glasses, as well as their original map was super interesting for understanding how our brains integrate data and the feedback in neuroplasticity.