Anomalous visual connections to somatosensory and auditory systems following brain lesions in early life.

When the principal sites of termination of retinofugal axons are removed in newborn hamsters and alternative terminal space is created by partial deafferentation of somatosensory or auditory thalamic nuclei, the optic axons form permanent ectopic connections in those nuclei. In operated hamsters, intraocularly injected radioactive label is transported transneuronally to the somatosensory or auditory cortices, suggesting that these higher order brain structures may process visual information.