Marshall Brain's Blog

This is a fascinating article: Brain fingerprints under scrutiny. According to the article:

Brain Fingerprinting, developed by Dr Larry Farwell, chief scientist and founder of Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, is a method of reading the brain's involuntary electrical activity in response to a subject being shown certain images relating to a crime.

Unlike the polygraph or lie detector to which it is often compared, the accuracy of this technology lies in its ability to pick up the electrical signal, known as a p300 wave, before the suspect has time to affect the output.

Also

"It doesn't depend upon the subjective interpretation of the person conducting the test. The computer monitors the information and comes up with information present or information absent."

And:

"In research with the FBI, we presented words and phrases that only an FBI agent would know and we could tell by the brain responses who was an FBI agent and who was not; we could do that with 100% accuracy," says Dr Farwell.

It is like a completely new form of polygraph test. The article has several ideas on applications.

The whole headband thing, along with the brainwave part, plus the 100% accuracy, makes it sound like a sci-fi film prop rather than reality -- 100% accurate truth detection on certain types of information. It is very interesting to speculate on where this might take us, especially if it were turned into a low-cost consumer product. Imagine, for example, parents and spouses using this...