Brain's activity map makes stable 'fingerprint'
- October 14, 2015, 6:54 pm
- Breaking News
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QUETTA: Neuroscientists have found that they can identify individuals based on a coarse map of which brain regions "pair up" in scans of brain activity.
The map is stable enough that the researchers could pick one person's pattern from a set of 126, by matching it to a scan taken on another day.
This was possible even if the person was "at rest" during one scan, and busy doing a task in the other.
Furthermore, aspects of the map can predict certain cognitive abilities.
Presented in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the findings demonstrate a surprising stability in this "functional fingerprint" of the brain.
"The exciting thing... is not that we can identify people by putting them in an MRI machine - because we can identify people just by looking at them," said Emily Finn, a PhD student at Yale University who co-wrote the study with her colleague Dr Xilin Shen.
"What was most exciting to me was that these profiles are so stable and reliable, in the same person, no matter if it's today or tomorrow and no matter what your brain is doing when we're scanning you."
Predicting intelligence:
Crucially, this fingerprint is based on brain activity - not the organ's physical structure.
In the the myriad links between our billions of brain cells, and even at the level of a normal MRI scan, we are all physically unique.
But Ms Finn and her colleagues drew a map of each brain purely on the basis of which regions, in each individual, tended to leap into action at the same time. They used data from functional MRI (fMRI), which records subtle ups and downs in the busyness of the brain.
Because it is relatively imprecise, fMRI has not typically been used to compare individual brains. Instead, scientists tend to record from several subjects and average the results.
