Yale study: Brain activity as unique as fingerprints 
 
 Photo: Contributed Photo Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Image 1 of 1 A new Yale-led shows that a person’s brain activity appears to be as unique as his or her fingerprints. A new Yale-led shows that a person’s brain activity appears to be as unique as his or her fingerprints. Photo: Contributed Photo Yale study: Brain activity as unique as fingerprints 1 / 1 Back to Gallery 
 
 The phrases “as unique as fingerprints” and “as individual as snowflakes” might soon be joined by the saying “as different as brain activity” in the wake of a new study led by researchers from the Yale School of Medicine. 
 
 The study, published Oct. 12 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, showed that researchers were able to identify people solely by looking at his or brain “connectivity profile.” These scans can be used to predict someone’s intelligence, and one day might help doctors predict or even treat neuropsychiatric illnesses, said Emily Finn, a Yale Ph.D. student in neuroscience and a co-first author of the paper. 
 
 The researchers compiled functional magnetic resonance imaging — or fMRI — data from 126 subjects who underwent six scan sessions over two days. Subjects performed different cognitive tasks during four of the sessions, and rested during the other two. 
 
 Functional MRIs are different from the more well-known structural MRIs, which as their name indicates, provide a structural image of the brain. Functional MRIs measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. 
 
 One of the biggest differences, Finn said, is that it’s hard to get useful information out of single fMRI scan. 
 
 “There isn’t a lot of clinical utility,” to fMRIs, she said. “You have to average the scans from a bunch of people.” 
 
 But the Yale study shows that useful information could be gained from a single fMRI. The team examined coordinated activity between different pairs of regions of the brain. Using the strength of these connections across the whole brain, the researchers were able to identify individuals from fMRI data alone, whether the subject was at rest or engaged in a task. They were also able to predict how subjects would perform on tasks. 
 
 Finn said she doesn’t think brain scans will or should replace other forms or treatment or intelligence assessment. 
 
 “Obviously, we don’t need to put someone in an MRI scanner to know who they are,” she said. “You can just look at them.” 
 
 But the scans could be a useful tool in the mental health arsenal. 
 
 “It could be one more piece of the puzzle,” Finn said. 
 
 Data for the study came from the Human Connectome Project led by the WU-Minn Consortium, which is funded by the 16 National Institutes of Health institutes and centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University. ||||| Humans have a love/hate relationship with the cliques, clades, and classes that compartmentalize their world. That tension forms the backbone of so much dystopian sci-fi: The protagonist of Divergent is special because she doesn’t fit into her society’s rigid castes of personality traits; Minority Report is all about the follies of judging people before they act. These stories are fun to think about in part because they’re fiction, not fact. 
 
 But now that neuroscientists have used maps of people’s brains to accurately predict intelligence, reality creeps ever so much closer to fiction. 
 
 By intelligence, in this case, the scientists mean abstract reasoning ability, which they inferred by mapping and analyzing the connections within people’s brains. But the study, published today in Nature Neuroscience, is compelling because it gets at a fundamental and very uncomfortable truth: Some brains are better than others at certain things, simply because of the way they’re wired. And now, scientists are closer to being able to determine precisely which brains those are, and how they got that way. 
 
 ‘In the future, WIRED could put job applicants in an MRI scanner and determine if they’re going to be good writers.’ 
 
 Intelligence research is relatively young. But ask researchers about the future of the field, and they get science fiction-y fast. “In the future, WIRED could put job applicants in an MRI scanner and look at their functional connections and determine if they’re going to be good writers,” Todd Constable, an author of the paper, says half-jokingly, as if that weren’t the most terrifying thing to say to a journalist. “It’s really early days, but that’s kind of the direction it’s headed.” 
 
 Richard Haier, an intelligence researcher at the University of California, Irvine, has some more serious, non-journalistic applications in mind: Eventually, he hopes, schools could scan children to see what sort of educational environment they’d thrive in, or determine who’s more prone to addiction, or screen prison inmates to figure out whether they’re violent or not. Two researchers brought up Minority Report as a salient example. 
 
 Figuring out if little Timmy’s a visual or auditory learner is great and all, but that other data—if you’re prone to addiction, or violence, or predisposed to having delusions—is much touchier. “It’s a double-edged sword,” says Laura Cabrera, a neuroethicist at Michigan State University. Schools could use the data to guide admissions decisions, companies could hire based on mental aptitude, insurance companies could base coverage on cognitive predispositions. Predictive brain scanning could lead to a whole new form of neurodiscrimination. 
 
 That tech isn’t quite at Divergent-like levels of maturity, of course. In this study, the researchers predicted how well people would do on a cognitive test by analyzing fMRI scans of 126 subjects in the Human Connectome Project, a five-year initiative to map how areas of the human brain communicate with each other. The subjects performed motor, memory, and intelligence tests, including a pattern completion test that measured abstract reasoning—what neuroscientists call fluid intelligence. 
 
 Their connectomes, it turned out, had a lot to do with how well they scored. “The more certain regions are talking to one another, the better you’re able to process information quickly and make inferences,” says Emily Finn, a grad student at Yale and another author of the study. A strong connection between the frontal and parietal lobes, especially, meant a high fluid intelligence score. Both regions are involved in high-level mental function, Finn says, which makes sense: “They kind of underpin all of the sophisticated stuff that makes us humans to begin with.” 
 
 Since each person’s connectome is unique, the Yale team hopes these findings will help researchers find more effective treatments for psychological disease. Doctors struggle to predict how patients with illnesses like schizophrenia will progress, since symptoms manifest differently in each individual. These connectomes could help determine how a psychiatric disease will play out or how patients will respond to a certain drug or therapy. 
 
 All these prognostications come with caveats, of course. These brain snapshots only capture the cranium at one particular moment—they don’t explain how connections are formed. And fluid intelligence is just one component of whatever people talk about when they talk about intelligence—a sort of raw ability distinct from comprehension or knowledge. “What happens in an MRI scanner isn’t what happens in daily life,” says Judy Illes, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia. 
 
 “It’s not wrong to say there are weird ethical implications to this,” Finn says, “but we’re still a long way from doing this with enough accuracy to apply in the real world.” Neuroscience will be waiting for its sorting hat for a while yet. ||||| What is the Connectome Coordination Facility? 
 
 The Connectome Coordination Facility (CCF) houses and distributes public research data for a series of studies that focus on the connections within the human brain. These are known as Human Connectome Projects. 
 
 The CCF currently supports 20 human connectome studies. Scroll down to learn more. ||||| Image copyright Emily Finn Image caption The researchers compared activity at 268 key locations in the brain 
 
 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. 
 
 "We were interested in flipping the traditional fMRI analysis on its head, and not asking what are the commonalities - how do all brains look the same, doing the same task - but rather, does the same brain look the same, regardless of what it's doing?" Ms Finn explained. 
 
 So they took fMRI results from the first 126 subjects of the Human Connectome Project, a huge US initiative to gather data about the brain's "wiring diagram". These subjects had all been scanned multiple times, on different days, both while they were resting and while they were occupied by various tests. 
 
 Within each of those scans, the researchers looked at what was happening in 268 key spots within the brain: how closely did the ups and downs at this spot match the ups and downs at all 267 other spots? 
 
 This produced a profile of the flow of activity in each brain. And that profile was consistent enough that the team could use it to pick out the same individual - more than 90% of the time - from a different set of scans, done on a different day. 
 
 They also found that they could use the profile to predict, to a certain degree, how well the subjects did at particular cognitive tests that measured "fluid intelligence". 
 
 This is a type of on-the-spot, untrained reasoning that is measured by some IQ tests. Ms Finn is quick to point out that her technique could never substitute for those questionnaires. 
 
 "None of us would recommend a brain scan over an IQ test," she said. "This is just proof-of-concept that these connectivity profiles are relevant to this very sophisticated cognitive behaviour." 
 
 Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Could these new scan-based techniques eventually help assess psychological problems? 
 
 If these individual maps show strong associations with psychological phenomena, she added, they could prove useful in the clinic. 
 
 "This opens the door to predicting things that are harder to tell just by looking at someone, or giving them a test - like risk for different mental illnesses." 
 
 Ones and zeros 
 
 Recently, a different study used a very similar technique to show that these brain maps can predict a range of characteristics, from someone's vocabulary to their income. 
 
 One of its authors, Prof Thomas Nichols, said he was not surprised that Ms Finn and her colleagues were able to distinguish individuals. 
 
 "What this is getting at is the very high-quality nature of this data," said Prof Nicholls, a brain imaging statistician at the University of Warwick. He said the data emerging from the Human Connectome Project, which also formed the basis of his study, is "bleeding-edge, state-of-the-art" stuff. 
 
 "It's really, really good and there's a huge volume of data on each subject." 
 
 Tim Behrens, professor of computational neuroscience at Oxford University, said he was most impressed by the consistency between the resting and task-based maps in the study. 
 
 "What is particularly interesting is that the way the brain connects… at rest, is so similar to how it connects during a task - when it's doing something interesting. That's what's exciting about it," Prof Behrens told the BBC. 
 
 By comparison, he said, you would not expect "the pattern of ones and noughts" in a busy computer to reflect the pattern in a computer that is not doing anything. 
 
 "It tells you that something about the function of the brain is fundamentally built into patterns of activity that just live there, all the time." 
 
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– Each person's brain activity, or "connectivity profile," may be as unique as a set of fingerprints, YaleNews reports—and could prove useful in IDing individuals, assessing intelligence, and predicting future success on certain tasks. In a study published Monday in Nature Neuroscience, scientists reviewed fMRI scans for 126 patients in the Human Connectome Project, which examines how different parts of the brain communicate with each other. They then had the subjects take a series of motor, memory, and intelligence tests, including one for abstract reasoning (aka "fluid" intelligence), Wired notes. Scientists found they could pick out a person's scan from others by matching it with a scan from another day, the BBC reports—and the brain profile could foretell how well subjects did on cognitive tasks. "The more certain regions are talking to one another, the better you're able to process information quickly and make inferences," study co-author Emily Finn tells Wired. So what could brain scans offer, in addition to helping treat neuropsychiatric diseases? "In the future, Wired could put job applicants in an MRI scanner and look at their functional connections and determine if they're going to be good writers," Todd Constable, another study co-author, jokes with the magazine. Other more practical applications, per a University of California, Irvine, researcher: determining an optimal educational environment for kids, seeing if certain people are prone to addiction, or figuring out which prison inmates are violent. But some experts fear future "neurodiscrimination," like insurance companies offering coverage based on brain profiles. And others note that brain scans only freeze one moment in time and that fluid intelligence is just one form of intelligence. But the authors say brain scans shouldn't be the end-all of intelligence assessment anyway. "It could be one more piece of the puzzle," Finn says, per the Connecticut Post. (A hidden virus may make some people dumber.)