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Brain Activity Identifies Individuals
Neuroscientists 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) inNature 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 who did not participate in the study. “To me I find that really exciting.”
The research team, based at Yale School of Medicine, extracted data from the Human Connectome Project, which includes functional MRI (fMRI) data from about 1,200 people so far. The Yale team analyzed imaging data from 268 different brain regions in 126 participants. To create a connectome profile for each individual, the researchers measured how strongly the activity of a specific brain region compared to the activity of every other brain region, creating an activity correlation matrix.
Each person, it turned out, had a unique activity correlation matrix. The team then used this profile to predict the identity of an individual in fMRI scans from another session.
Depending on the type of fMRI scan assessed, the researchers could nail someone’s identity with up to 99 percent accuracy. Scans taken during mental tasks, rather than resting, made it more difficult, and the accuracy dropped to below 70 percent.
“Even though brain function is always changing, and we saw it’s slightly harder to identify people when they are doing different things, people always looked most similar to themselves” than to another participant, said Emily Finn, a graduate student in Todd Constable’s lab and the lead author of the study.
Fair pointed out that one of the most individualized brain regions is the frontoparietal cortex, which helps to filter incoming information. He has found the same result in his own work on fingerprinting connectivity. “It really seems important for making an individual who we are,” he said.
The ability to identify individuals even during tasks on different days would be important for clinical applications. Mental disorders are often classified by phenotype, or symptoms, that may represent a variety of underlying causes. “These types of technologies I think are going to help us personalize mental health better,” Fair told The Scientist. “We’ll have more information to say specifically what’s happening in your brain.”
Finn’s group was also able to associate a person’s connectome with his or her “fluid intelligence.” This trait is measured by asking people to solve a problem or find a pattern without using language or math skills or learned information. Finn told The Scientist that stronger connections between the prefrontal and parietal lobes, brain regions already known to be involved in higher order cognition, were most indicative of higher fluid intelligence scores. The results “suggest levels of integration of different brain systems are giving rise to superior cognitive ability,” she said.
“It’s not just this idiosyncratic fingerpint that they’re talking about that basically allows you to differentiate one individual from another,” Braver said of the study, “but it pushes the idea that [the connectivity signature is] functionally relevant, that those things may be related to things that we think are interesting individual differences, like intelligence.”
Finn cautioned that the intelligence correlation is more a proof of concept to link brain connectivity with behaviors, rather than something having real-life applications. “Hopefully, we could replace that with some variable, like a neuropsychiatric illness or [predicting] who’s going to respond best to some treatment.”
E.S. Finn et al., “Functional connectome fingerprinting: identifying individuals using patterns of brain connectivity,” Nature Neuroscience, doi:10.1038/nn.4135, 2015.
Source: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/44212/title/Brain-Activity-Identifies-Individuals/
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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