A Simple Power Law Governs Many Sensory Amplifications and Multisensory Enhancements

Multisensory integration, sensory substitution and visual rehabilitation.

Sensory substitution has advanced remarkably over the past 35 years since first introduced to the scientific literature by Paul Bach-y-Rita. In this issue dedicated to his memory, we describe a collection of reviews that assess the current state of neuroscience research on sensory substitution, visual rehabilitation, and multisensory processes.

Simple stochastic models and their power-law type behaviour.

A power-law relationship between the mean and variance of ecological time series has been shown to hold for a vast number of species. Here we examine the behaviour of single-species stochastic models and concentrate in particular on the mean-variance relationship as the carrying capacity becomes large. Single-species stochastic models can be written as Markov chains, and the long-term distribut...

Book Review: Cortex Governs Multisensory Integration in the Midbrain

The elegant law that governs us all.

A dog owner weighs twice as much as her German shepherd. Does she eat twice as much? Does a big city need twice as many gas stations as one that is half its size? Our first instinct is to say yes. But, alas, we are wrong. On a per-gram basis, a human requires about 25% less food than her dog, and the larger city needs only 85% more gas stations. If we double the population of a city, we also ne...

Are the Primary Sensory Cortices Multisensory?

Historically the brain has been viewed as operating in a modular and hierarchical manner. In particular it was previously assumed that each of the primary sensory cortices processed input from a single sensory modality before feeding this information to higher regions of the brain devoted to multisensory integration. This review however outlines a wealth of findings that have emerged in recent ...