Functional organization of surgically created visual circuits.

Lesions of cerebral targets of the retina in newborn hamsters, when combined with transection of lemniscal pathways to the primary auditory or somatosensory thalamic nuclei or the secondary thalamic visual nucleus, can induce the formation of permanent retinal projections to the deafferented non-visual structures. These projections are retinotopically organized and form functional synapses. Consequently, neurons in the auditory or somatosensory cortices, which normally are not driven by visual stimuli, become visually responsive and have receptive field properties that ressemble, in several important ways, those of neurons in the visual cortex of normal animals. The surgically-induced retinothalamo-cortical pathways can mediate visually guided behaviors whose normal substrate, the pathway from the retina to the primary visual cortex via the thalamic dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus, is missing.