Researchers Can Identify You By Your Brain Waves With 100% Accuracy (business-standard.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have developed a new system that can identify people using their brain waves or 'brainprint' with 100% accuracy, an advance that may be useful in high-security applications. Researchers at Binghamton University in U.S. recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset while they looked at a series of 500 images designed specifically to elicit unique responses from person to person -- e.g., a slice of pizza, a boat, or the word "conundrum." They found that participants' brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer's 'brainprint' with 100% accuracy. "When you take hundreds of these images, where every person is going to feel differently about each individual one, then you can be really accurate in identifying which person it was who looked at them just by their brain activity," said Assistant Professor Sarah Laszlo. One thing the paper doesn't talk about is the effect of time on the accuracy of the system. People may perceive different things when looking at the same picture a year later, for instance.

Comments

Re:100% accuracy...with 50 people

[Immerman]

Indeed. My statistics are rusty, but with only 50 participants it seems unlikely you could legitimately claim a general accuracy above maybe a mid-to-high 90 percentile. Even then you'd be talking about the general accuracy within a 50-person group. Take a 500 person group and the average difference between two sets of brainwaves would naively be expected to be about 1/10th the size, and the minimum difference would likely fall far faster than that. Take a more generally useful set size, like say the population of a major city, and I seriously doubt they could uniquely identify anyone but the most abnormal.