Study finds unique patterns like 'fingerprints' in brains of people who are born blind

In people born blind, the primary visual cortex, the brain's region known to process visual information, develops unique patterns different from those in people with sight, researchers said, likening these patterns to an "individual fingerprint." They said that the connectivity in the visual cortices of people who can see did not show such varied changes and were "usually fairly consistent."

"The connectivity pattern in people born blind is more different across people, like an individual fingerprint, and is stable over time -- so much so that the individual person can be identified from the connectivity pattern," said lead author Ella Striem-Amit, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Georgetown University, US.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), included a small sample of people born blind, who underwent repeated functional MRI scans for over two years. Upon analysing the scans, the researchers found the unique connectivity patterns showed "remarkable stability" over time.

"Our study found that these patterns did not change significantly based on the task at hand -- whether participants were localising sounds, identifying shapes, or simply resting. Instead, the connectivity patterns were unique to each individual and remained stable over the two-year study period," said Lenia Amaral, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgetown University.

The findings suggested that life experiences shape the different ways in which one's brain develops, especially if they grew up without being able to see, the authors said. "Brain plasticity in these cases frees the brain to develop, possibly even for different possible uses for the visual cortex, among different people born blind," Striem-Amit said.

Brain plasticity, or neuroplasticity, refers to the ability to re-organise and restructure itself in response to changes in the environment. Individual connectivity patterns could also be helpful in tailoring solutions for restoring sight in people born blind, the authors said.