Investigating Brain Change

By Jerry Grillo

Ming-fai Fong has always been interested in what she thinks of as the existential struggle embedded in her research; this notion of focusing simultaneously on the science and the people it can impact. 

It turns out, the struggle is more like a loop, with the research impacting the people, and the people impacting the direction of the research.

“I’m interested in how things work, in the science, in exploring and researching. But I always ask myself, ‘what or who am I doing this for?’ So, I try my best to stay connected with the community, with the people whose health and wellbeing we’re ultimately working to improve,” said Fong, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Fong’s desire to stay connected to communities through her work manifested while she was an undergraduate mechanical engineering student at M.I.T. She wanted to make assistive devices for individuals with disabilities. So, she moved to northwestern Mexico for a fellowship designing wheelchairs for people who had been impacted by drug violence in the region. 

That experience indirectly led her to the Coulter Department, where the Fong lab studies how activity and experience shape brain circuits, with the goal of developing treatments for neurological disorders. Currently, her team is investigating the central visual pathway and visual impairments. 

When they aren’t working on research, Fong and the students in her lab volunteer with the Center for the Visually Impaired and Georgia Blind Sports Association. And whether they are repairing specialized typewriters called Braillers or working with athletes and coaches at a goalball match, those activities are helping to guide the research. It’s all part of the existential loop.

“Our latest research proposal really grew out of our interactions with the blind and visually impaired community in Atlanta,” said Fong, who recently won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and will use the funding to support her lab’s study of plasticity — the ability to adapt and learn — in the adult brain. 

“We were inspired by the residual sensory abilities of many people we’ve interacted with,” Fong added. “For example, some visually impaired people may develop a heightened sense of hearing. Motivated by a lack of accommodations and infrastructure for this community, we want to study how these enhanced sensory capacities emerge in people with irreversible visual impairment."

Yichaeo Zhao (grad student in the Fong lab), Robert Lamprecht (former lab technician in Fong lab) and Ming-fai Fong are part of the volunteer team from her lab that has worked with the Center for the Visually Impaired and Georgia Blind Sports Association. "We try our best to stay connected with the community, with the people whose health and wellbeing we’re ultimately working to improve," Fong says. 

Plasticity City

While Fong is referring to a lack of real-world infrastructure suitable for blind and visually impaired people, the concept is an appropriate metaphor when explaining the brain and plasticity. 

Think of the brain as a growing city when we’re young, constantly under construction, new infrastructure rapidly emerging everywhere. This is known as the “critical period.” When we’re children, that’s a period of time when the brain is very adaptable and capable of easily learning new things. As our brains age (or the city grows), development slows down — because neuroplasticity decreases as we get older.

When you experience vision loss, it’s kind of like what happens when a major road closes and the city has to work quickly to find other routes to keep traffic moving. When vision is lost, the flexible brain reconfigures itself to adapt, finding new ways to process information through other senses, like hearing. 

But it’s a matter of timing, a window of opportunity that Fong and her team want to keep open, if possible.

“We want to understand the critical period, and how this reconfiguration process works,” said Fong. “Ultimately, we think that by depriving the brain of one sense, like vision, we can reopen the critical period, making the brain more adaptable again, even in adulthood.”

To test their ideas, Fong’s team will observe how the brains of mice change when vision is impaired, paying close attention to areas of the brain responsible for hearing.

“Hopefully, we can reveal new ways to help people with sensory impairments by making their brains more adaptable, like they were in childhood,” said Fong, who is quick to point out a common misconception: losing your vision does not automatically improve your audition, or sense of hearing.

Yes, there are people with vision loss who learn to expertly use echolocation — making sounds and listening to the echoes — to navigate their surroundings. But that may be the exception, particularly when thinking of people who lose their vision as adults. 

“For every one of those stories, there are 100 others in which someone can’t tell you what direction a sound is coming from,” said Fong.

In addition to studying ways to identify and leverage the critical period of plasticity, Fong will use the CAREER Award to help support her lab’s education initiatives targeting blind and visually impaired youth. With hands-on Brailler repair workshops and multi-sensory teaching tools, the program seeks to create inclusive learning environments for all non-visual learners, while promoting the STEM fields. 

Beyond the lab and the research, Fong is considering her initial motivation for the work, “the lack of inclusive infrastructure for individuals with disabilities. One long term goal we have is to provide a neuro-scientific basis for advocating for improved accommodations,” she said. “If our work can help make it possible for this remarkable community to participate in and contribute to society more broadly, that would be huge.”