This image shows the functional connections in the brain that tend to be most discriminating of individuals. Many of them are between the frontal and parietal lobes, which are involved in complex cognitive tasks.EMILY FINNNeuroscientists have developed a method to pick out an individual solely by his connectome—a pattern of synchronized neural activity across numerous brain regions. Researchers had observed previously that brain connectivity is a unique trait, but a new study, published today (October 12) in Nature Neuroscience, demonstrates that neural patterns retain an individual’s signature even during different mental activities.
“What’s unique here is they were able to show it’s not just the functional connectivity—which is how different brain regions are communicating over time when you’re not doing a specific task—but even how the brain is activated during a specific task that is also very fingerprint-like,” said Damien Fair, who uses neuroimaging to study psychopathologies at Oregon Health and Science University but wasn’t involved with the study.
Fair and others said individuated brain scans could be applied to better understand the diversity of mental illnesses often lumped into the same diagnosis. “We don’t kneed to keep going at the average. We have the power to look at individuals,” said Todd Braver of Washington University in St. Louis who did not participate in the study. “To ...
