Did You Know That Your Brain Has a ‘Fingerprint’ and it Can Be Identified in Just 100 Seconds?

Our brains are some of the most complicated things ever studied, but it turns out an fMRI can literally read you like a book.

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:04 Our brains are a vast and personally unique network,

00:07 more complicated than any machine mankind has ever been able to create.

00:11 So how long would it take an fMRI to get a fingerprint of your brain?

00:14 It turns out only about 100 seconds.

00:16 And this is what that brain fingerprint looks like,

00:19 with all the information an expert would need to pick your print out of a crowd.

00:23 Here's how neuroscientist Enrico Amico explains the image.

00:26 The connectome is a map of the neural network.

00:29 They inform us about what subjects were doing during their MRI scan.

00:32 If they were resting or performing some other task, for example.

00:35 Adding that the connections would change and

00:37 appear different depending on the type of activity being performed.

00:40 The researchers say the more time the fMRI has to take in information,

00:44 the better the brain fingerprint becomes.

00:46 But they only need one minute and 40 seconds to have a reliably accurate print

00:50 they can identify from others.

00:51 The researchers say better understanding this signature at a structural level

00:55 could provide better insights about disease progression as well.

00:58 Possibly giving us an avenue to identify, disrupt, or even prevent

01:02 neurological diseases like Alzheimer's based solely on one of these prints.