Patterns of individual variation in visual pathway structure and function in the sighted and blind

Many structural and functional brain alterations accompany blindness. In normally sighted people, there is correlated individual variation in some visual pathway structures. Here we examined if the changes in brain anatomy produced by blindness alter this pattern of variation. We derived eight measures of central visual pathway anatomy from an MPRAGE image of the brain from 59 sighted and 53 blind people. These measures showed highly significant differences in mean size between the sighted and blind cohorts. When we examined the measurements across individuals within each group, we found three clusters of correlated variation, with V1 surface area and pericalcarine volume linked, and indepen