You are 100 percent unique. So says a recent study from Yale University, published in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience.
Your brain has an individualized fingerprint. One that could be used to specialize treatment for your bipolar or for others who have different types of mood disorders.
Emily Finn, a PhD student at Yale, led the study, which examined brain scans of 126 people.
“Ultimately, we hope these profiles could someday be used in personalized medicine, a way to customize interventions and therapies for people based on their individual biology,” Finn says in the study.
“Maybe we could find a way to predict [mental illness] so we can intervene and prevent,” she told NBC News.
The data was gathered from those 126 people, whose brains were scanned over two days while either performing challenging tasks or resting. The tests involved motor skills, memory, language, and emotions. During each set of tests, researchers examined how 10 brain networks lit up with activity.
Two brain networks in particular — the medial frontal network and the frontoparietal network — were examined.
“We know that [these regions] are involved in sophisticated functions, like attention, memory, and language. The stuff that we think makes us human,” Finn told PBS. “As opposed to the lower-order areas that just control muscles or process the visual senses from the retina.”
There are practical uses aplenty for this research.
“With this technique, you might do a brain scan of a person that you’re interviewing for a job to find out if they’ll be a hard worker or diligent or to assess their people skills,” Peter Bandettini, chief of functional imaging methods at the National Institute of Mental Health, told PBS. He was not involved in the study. “The work is important because it represents one of the holy grails of functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).”
Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, is the process of measuring brain activity using blood flow.
Academia could quite possibly benefit from this research. Brain fingerprints might offer a glimpse into a student’s intelligence, and, according to Bandettini, possibly in the future there will be no need for SATs because students can have their brains scanned.
This new process is highly promising in that it might change the treatment of mental illness, but the other potential uses, such as scanning brains for job interviews or college admission, sound Orwellian. Count me out.
