What is meant by physiologically the same? Because there is a lot of heterogeneity among neurons in the human brain, and there are definitely some macro-level d

What is meant by physiologically the same? Because there is a lot of heterogeneity among neurons in the human brain, and there are definitely some macro-level differences between cortical regions that are innate (i.e. happen even with sensory deprivation). So I'd honestly be very surprised if different cortical regions did not have some differences in gene expression patterns that are "hard coded". Which can affect neural dynamics in a subtle way. Determining how much that matters for this hypothesis would require a probably impossible experiment though. FWIW there definitely was an old paper where the animal model (IIRC a ferret?) was deafened and had its visual cortex ablated, and then they wired the lower level visual regions to the auditory cortex, quite early in development. The animal could sort of see, and the auditory cortex had developed a bunch of visual cortex like properties, which is pretty awesome. But at the same time it was certainly not the same thing as using the visual cortex to do so, if you look at the actual behavior the animal had clear deficits in its visual capabilities. Of course that is far from a perfect version of the experiment being described though. Anyway, I read that a long while ago but here is a link to a broader review written by the researcher that did that work, in case anyone is interested in digging further: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16272112/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16272112/