Patent ID: 8805489

Claim:
A method for identifying a personal meaning of a stimulus to an examinee, wherein said personal meaning is conscious or unconscious to said examinee, the method comprising: exposing said examinee to at least one stimulus; providing a measuring system capable of measuring Electro-Encephalo-Graphy (“EEG”), including at least one recording electrode; measuring EEG signals using said measuring system; providing a processor to process EEG; processing the measured EEG using said processor to process EEG, extracting Event Related Potentials (“ERP”) in response to a stimulus that is presented to said examine; determining whether at least one predefined pattern can be identified in said ERP in response to said stimulus, wherein the predefined pattern is characterized by at least one of: a) prominent positive deflection over the right hemisphere with peak latency at a time between 200-500 milliseconds from stimulus onset; b) prominent negative deflection with peak amplitude over the right hemisphere in frontal or temporal locations with peak latency between 500-900 milliseconds; c) enhanced amplitude of at least one common appearing positive or negative peak of an ERP response to said stimulus, in comparison with the ERP response to other stimuli in said examinee, or in comparison with a selected averaged ERP response to stimuli, including peaks P1-N1-P2 or other peaks, as commonly defined in the relevant literature, wherein P1 is the first occurring positive deflection in the ERP response and N1 is the first occurring prominent negative deflection in the ERP response and P2 is the second occurring prominent positive deflection in the ERP response, occurring after N1; d) enhanced amplitude of a negative peak with a latency between 200-500 milliseconds, in comparison with the amplitude of a similar peak in the ERP response to other stimuli in said examinee, or in comparison with a similar peak amplitude in a selected averaged ERP response to stimuli; or e) another certain voltage deflection over a certain scalp area that can be shown to be related to a certain personal emotional meaning; and inferring the personal meaning of said stimulus to said examinee based on the identification of said at least one predefined pattern in said ERP, wherein said personal meaning is selected from a group consisting of: positive personal emotional meaning, negative personal emotional meaning, and person passion.