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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 27 2017, @08:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the I'll-drink-to-that! dept.

There is growing interest in the potential for a technology known as brain fingerprinting to be used in the fight against crime and terrorism, but it's far from reliable.

Its use without consent violates human rights. And importantly, the technology (as it currently exists) can be tricked.

Brain fingerprinting seeks to detect deception by essentially reading thoughts. It works by using electroencephelography (EEG) to read the electrical activity of the brain, with the aim of trying to identify a phenomenon known as the P300 response [DOI: 10.1097/00004691-199210000-00002] [DX].

The P300 response is a noticeable spike in the brain's electrical activity, which usually occurs within one-third of a second of being shown a familiar stimulus. The idea is that our subconscious brain has an uncontrollable and measurable response to familiar stimuli that the machine can register.

Imagine, for example, that a particular knife was used in a murder, and police show an image of it to their lead suspect who denies the crime. If the suspect registers a P300 response and thus a positive recognition of the knife, this would seem to suggest he's lying. Alternatively, if the suspect doesn't register a positive recognition, maybe police have the wrong guy.

Could you escape culpability for your crimes by taking a roofie afterward?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:20AM (#573712)

    Brain has this horrifying and wonderful complexity. This thing is.. reducing that huge yet finite complexity to something "manageable". So is phrenology.

    Maybe the brain reacts to the smell of the interrogator, the shirt he wears, the material the knifes handle in made of, that looks like the suspects favourite toy from when he was 8...

    How can they say that this specific stimulus is representing *that* and not *this*? What about non-neurotypical people?

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