Did you know humans can be identified via brain ‘fingerprints’?

But the most identifiable moment of the scans was not locked to a particular time point, which may have to do with how our brains naturally cycle their activity, the team suspect.

Hyderabad: What if we told you our brains have unique ‘fingerprints’? We wouldn’t be surprised if brain patterns are used to identify humans in the near future much like we use fingerprints now. Many neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s can be detected using these brain ‘fingerprints’ too.

“An individual’s functional brain connectivity profile is both unique and reliable, similar to a fingerprint, and it is possible, with near-perfect accuracy in many cases, to identify an individual among a large group of subjects solely on the basis of her or his connectivity profile,” neuroscientist and lead researcher Dimitri Van De Ville and the team write in their paper.

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The researchers found that while longer time scales allowed for better differentiation between individuals, 1 minute and 40 seconds was all it took for enough data to be collected for reliable identification. But the most identifiable moment of the scans was not locked to a particular time point, which may have to do with how our brains naturally cycle their activity, the team suspect.

“We realised that the information needed for a brain fingerprint to unfold could be obtained over very short time periods,” said scientist Enrico Amico. “There’s no need for an MRI that measures brain activity for five minutes, for example. Shorter time scales could work, too,” he added.

The findings were published in the journal ‘Science Advances’.

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