Plasticity in the tonotopic organization of the medial geniculate body in adult cats following restricted unilateral cochlear lesions

To investigate subcortical contributions to cortical reorganization, the frequency organization of the ventral nucleus of the medial geniculate body (MGv) in six normal adult cats and in eight cats with restricted unilateral cochlear lesions was investigated using multiunit electrophysiological recording techniques. The tonotopic organization of MGv in the lesioned animals, with severe mid-to-high frequency hearing losses, was investigated 40-186 days following the lesioning procedure. Frequency maps were generated from neural responses to pure tone bursts presented separately to each ear under barbiturate anesthesia. Consideration of the frequency organization in normal animals, and of the apparently normal representation of the ipsilateral (unlesioned) cochlea in lesioned animals, allowed for a detailed specification of the extent of changes observed in MGv. In the lesioned animals it was found that, in the region of MGv in which mid-to-high frequencies are normally represented, there was an "expanded representation" of lesion-edge frequencies. Neuron clusters within these regions of enlarged representation that had "new" characteristic frequencies displayed response properties (latency, bandwidth) very similar to those in normal animals. Thresholds of these neurons were not consistent with the argument that the changes merely reflect the residue of prelesion responses, suggesting a dynamic process of reorganization. The tonotopic reorganization observed in MGv is similar to that seen in the primary auditory cortex and is more extensive than the reorganization found in the auditory midbrain, suggesting that the auditory thalamus plays an important role in cortical plasticity.