Everyone require to sense special , but it turns out you really are : Your brain reacts and responds to input so uniquely to you that scientists can apply a “ brain print ” to identify you from others with 100 percent accuracy . This new subject area of brain biostatistics out of Binghamton University ( BU ) was published in the journalIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security .
Researchers addict 56 people up to an electroencephalogram headset while the player view a series of 400 images : 100 sine gratings ( wavy pedigree ) , 100 grim frequency words , 100 image of food for thought , and 100 celebrity fount . Each image flaunt onscreen for only 200 millisecond , a process that take about 30 minutes . Most of the image were black and white , though some were in color — and player had to react to the color range by hitting a button . “ The goal was to try and recover imagery that we thought had a chance of being react to really unambiguously from person to person , ” Sarah Laszlo , adjunct professer of psychological science at BU , tellsmental_floss . “ Almost by intuition we thought a couple of those kinds of things would be pictures of celebrities and food . Then we had another category of optic stimuli that wait just like riffle because those powerfully trigger the ocular cortex in humans . ”
It work out that the optic cortex of each human wit is in many way unique , like a fingermark . “ Each person has a more or less different set of folds in their optic cortex , so we knew if we were punch the visual cortex , it would be very dissimilar from mortal to person , ” Laszlo says .
This study built upon one in 2015 , write inNeurocomputing , that was able to distinguish one someone out of a mathematical group of 32 by that person ’s response to a set of words , with a rate of 97 percent truth .
“ When I first incur into this I thought we ’d be lucky if we could do [ identify a person ] 25 percent of the time , ” Laszlo says . When their 100 per centum accuracy rate reverse up , she allege , “ My jaw overleap . ”
She attributes the winner rate to including information inspired by a psychological access : “ This was the first endeavor that had psychologists on the team instead of only engineers , and I think that turned out to be really good . ” Still , she gives credit to lead engineer Zhanpeng Jin , assistant prof of electrical and computer technology , for “ being willing to get help and think that someone knew something he did n’t have a go at it . ”
The actual recognition process require a computer ’s assistance to study the mastermind prints , and it has strong conditional relation for build up a new var. of data point security .
She cite a compositor’s case of Chinese cyber - espionage in which an agent stole a database full of fingerprint of 2.5 million Union workers . “ So now any system that was secured by those fingerprints was compromised for good because fingerprints do n’t change and you ca n’t grow new fingers , ” she says . “ These want to be replace with something more secure . We think that a brain print might be able to do that . ”
Their study is promising because it could be extremely hard to whoop . And even if it could be hack , one could easily make a Modern mental capacity mark . “ If your brain print was a response to food for thought and celebrity , like we ’ve done here , you could cancel it and supplant it with a unexampled one that is a reply to works and vegetables , or something different , ” Laszlo tell .
They are now working on agency to hack on the mental process to see if it is potential , for representative , to pose someone ’s brain photographic print . “ To do that , we are doing this awesome experimentation where people add up in , we call them brain hacker , and we non - invasively stir their learning ability in the radiation pattern of someone else ’s brain , to see whether we can make their brain activity more like to somebody else ’s , ” she say .
