Lack of Senses

Originally posted by Mindship
(1) By "sensory input," I assume you mean stimuli taken in via a metacellular, differentiated nervous system.

(2) However, stimulus-response activity also occurs at subtler levels, eg, cellular activity. Given the utter absence of gross sensory input, a brain could become aware of these subtler levels (like how one can see the stars once the sun goes down). Indeed, I would say the brain would become aware, given its "data-seeking/data-hungry" nature.

(3) What you seem to be asking then is, How would an information-processing system respond in an absolute stimulus-vacuum? Given the hierarchical nature of living systems, I would imagine this would be a virtually impossible set-up.

(1) You assume correct.

(2) Could you perhaps elaborate on this a bit further, if possible? Or give an example of a particular cellular-level stimulus that could elicit some form or neurological response.

(3) Hmm, well maybe I should have proposed something more along the lines of imagining a brain essentially in a vessel essentially doing nothing more than being kept alive... maybe something akin to this:

Originally posted by xmarksthespot
inamilist: Would such neuroplasticity in your opinion occur if there was no alternative sensory input?

I have to say no, and also note that I am not very confident there are other modalities aside from our normal "senses" that we could use (depending on how well we understand our sensory systems at this point) in place of the 5 major ones (or that wouldn't be so similar to the 5 main ones that it is sort of a cheat).

No input means no plasticity, or put another way, the plasticity that occurs will be the dying off of the neurons that would eventually form the sensory cortices. Surely some of the neurons would differentiate and stay, giving some difference between the organization of the sense-less brain vs a normal brain, but plasticity is based off of the strength of input. No input, no reason for the areas to grow in the first place.

Originally posted by xmarksthespot
Too lazy to divide the quote so I numbered segments.

Could you perhaps elaborate on this a bit further, if possible? Or give an example of a particular cellular-level stimulus that could elicit some form or neurological response.