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Brain scans could soon become a routine part of job interviews.
Researchers have revealed that studying the pattern of connections inside the brain can can also be used to predict a person's ability to think logically and quickly solve problems in unfamiliar situations.
The unique pattern of connections within a person's brain can be used like a fingerprint to reliably identify individuals from a large group of people.
Researchers have revealed the pattern of connections inside the brain(pictured) can predict a person's ability to think logically and quickly solve problems.
The study, published in Nature, shows that this fingerprint-like pattern of connections can also be used to predict a person's ability to think logically and quickly solve problems in unfamiliar situations.
Neuroimaging research has traditionally examined brain activity across different groups of people to better understand brain function across the general population.
Studies that contrast two groups often ignore individual differences in brain activity, but whether the unique characteristics of a person's brain connection profile are stable enough to identify an individual from a large group remained an open question.
'In most past studies, fMRI data have been used to draw contrasts between, say, patients and healthy controls,' said Emily Finn of Yale, a Ph.D. student in neuroscience and co-first author of the paper.
'We have learned a lot from these sorts of studies, but they tend to obscure individual differences which may be important.'
Using data from 126 participants of the Human Connectome Project, Finn and colleagues demonstrate that a connection profile obtained from one of six imaging sessions—two while participants rested and one each as they performed working memory, emotion, motor, and language tasks—can be used to identify an individual from a set of profiles obtained in a subsequent session.
Researchers looked at activity in 268 brain regions: specifically, coordinated activity between pairs of regions.
Highly coordinated activity implies two regions are functionally connected.
Using the strength of these connections across the whole brain, the researchers were able to identify individuals from fMRI data alone, whether the subject was at rest or engaged in a task.
Functional connections in the brain can act as an identifying 'fingerprint,' since each individual has a unique pattern.
They were also able to predict how subjects would perform on tasks.
The authors found that they could successfully identify individuals across the resting and task-related sessions, indicating that the overall connectivity profile is intrinsic to the individual.
They also found that connectivity profiles could predict fluid intelligence, a measure of the ability for quick reasoning and problem solving.
The medial frontal and frontoparietal networks, which comprised brain regions within the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes that are associated with cognitive control and altering connection patterns during tasks, were the most distinct between individuals and the strongest predictors of fluid intelligence, the team wrote.