CIHR funding received for two major research projects.

Our lab is fortunate to receive funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Fall 2020 competition), as co-Applicant on two new research projects.

The first project is entitled “Neuroplastic impacts of hearing augmentation on cognitive abilities” and driven by Dr. Etienne de Villers-Sidani, based like us at the Montreal Neurological Institute. The primary goal is to characterize the relationship between age-related hearing loss, cognitive abilities and quality of life. Recent evidence indeed suggests that hearing loss may be a precursor of age-related dementia because it contributes to social isolation and therefore, cognitive decline, through mechanisms we aim to better understand.

We will investigate these questions via the effects of hearing augmentation (with hearing aids) on measures of cognitive ability and neurophysiology (including a cool new approach to measure the frequency tuning of small auditory cortical areas with MEG, stay…tuned for more) in age-related hearing loss individuals.

The other project concerns the “Structural and functional changes in the brain of early and late blind individuals”. This one is driven by Dr. Maurice Ptito at the University of Montreal, and aims at investigating the brain pathways through which non-visual information is conveyed to the occipital cortex in late blind individuals, and to clarify the brain micro-structural and neurophysiological changes induced by late-onset blindness in adult life.

We will build on the recent research work we published recently with Maurice and collaborator Dr. Ron Kupers, where we reported in Nature Communications a thalamocortical pathway for fast rerouting of tactile information to occipital cortex in congenital blindness.

A. Brain activations in V1 following left index finger stimulation (t=0ms). CB (red) showed an early activation peak in the occipital cortex after 35 ms (arrow) and a later one after 55 ms. SC (blue) only showed a late occipital response after 90 ms. B. Stronger directed connectivity in the alpha frequency band from thalamus (Th) to V1 in CB. C. Model of the rewiring of tactile information to the occipital cortex via both a cortico-cortical and a thalamo-cortical route (Muller et al., Nature Communications, 2019).