Scientists at the University of Binghamton, in New York, have recently completed research that has determined that brainwaves may just be the way people will be identified in the future making fingerprints obsolete. Their research is scheduled for publication in July.
The researchers claim that not only are these brain scans, these “brainprints”, accurate but they claim that they are able to identify a particular person 100 percent of the time. Just through the brain activity alone, the scientists could pick out the individual based on their reactions to certain stimuli.
The experiments were performed on 50 volunteers who were hooked up to electroencephalogram (EEG) machines. The volunteers were then presented with a series of 500 different images and their reactions were noted and categorized. The photos were chosen by the scientists to try and trigger a particular response in the individual volunteers. They saw images of everything from pizza to the word “conundrum” to the actress Anne Hathaway.
Dr. Sarah Lazlo, the lead author of the research, and a psychologist, remarked that, “The images were chosen with the major design principle being that we wanted them to illicit very different responses from person to person. Some images we selected on the basis of a pre-study we did where we asked participants to tell us about food and celebrities that they loved and hated…”
According to the subsequent scans of each of the volunteers’ brains, everyone in the experiment acted completely different from everyone else regarding any of the 500 images shown. No one had the exact same reaction to a picture of pizza or to a particular celebrity. As the information was fed into their computer program, the computer was able to identify any of the volunteers with perfect accuracy.
Lazlo believes these “brainprints” would be more valuable than fingerprints because, if they are stolen, they could be re-calibrated and created again simply exposing the subject to new visual stimuli. The researchers believe that these “brainprints” will allow for trying to understand a person’s mental and emotional state at a particular time and could not only identify them but could act as a foolproof lie detector device.
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