Individual differences of brain plasticity in early visual deprivation

Early-onset blindness leads to reorganization in visual cortex connectivity and function. However, this has mostly been studied at the group level, largely ignoring differences in brain reorganization across early blind individuals. To test whether plasticity manifests differently in different blind individuals, we studied resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) from the primary visual cortex in a large cohort of blind individuals. We find increased individual differences in connectivity patterns, corresponding to areas that show reorganization in blindness. Further, using a longitudinal approach in repeatedly sampled blind individuals, we showed that such individual patterns of organization and plasticity are stable over time, to the degree of decoding individual participant identity over 2 years. Together, these findings suggest that visual cortex reorganization is not ubiquitous, highlighting the potential diversity in brain plasticity and the importance of harnessing individual differences for fitting rehabilitation approaches for vision loss.