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Each person is unique. You can identify people by their DNA, fingerprints, personal preferences and behavior. But new research out of Yale University has shown we have another unique identifier: How our brains work.
“We all have this intuition that people are unique. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, our quirks and personalities, what we’re good at and how we handle things,” says study co-first author Emily Finn, a pHD student in neuroscience at Yale. “It’s very easy to observe that from the outside … but it’s been pretty hard to find correlates in brain activities.”
And yet, it is the brain that makes all those differences possible. Knowing this, Finn and co-first author Xilin Shen, an associate research scientist at Yale, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to see if our brains each have a unique “fingerprint” that could distinguish one person from another.
They scanned the brains of 126 participants in the Human Connectome Project while they performed several different tasks. They mapped the connections in the prefrontal cortex and parietal lobes — recently evolved parts of the brain involved in complex functions like attention and language — to develop connectivity profiles of each person. They found that each person’s bran activity profile was indeed unique.
Read full, original post: Connections in the Brain, Like Fingerprints, Can Identify Individuals
