Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. Oh. We think of
Speaker 1: fingerprints as being something each of us carries around on
Speaker 1: the terminal knuckle of our fingers, unchanging and unique from
Speaker 1: everybody else's. That might be true for our digits, but
Speaker 1: new research suggests that our brains have fingerprints too, and
Speaker 1: that we can find them pretty quickly. Using an MRI machine,
Speaker 1: neuroscientists can create what amounts to a map of your
Speaker 1: brain called a functional brain connect home. The human brain
Speaker 1: is a little like a country, with different regions in it.
Speaker 1: One region for short term memory, another for hearing, another
Speaker 1: for hand movement. The first map of the brain was
Speaker 1: published in nineteen o nine by a German physician who
Speaker 1: defined fifty two distinct areas of the brain. These days,
Speaker 1: these brain regions are called cortical areas and researchers who
Speaker 1: identified of them, and they're connected by these little neural
Speaker 1: fibers that act as highways. A connect dome is based
Speaker 1: on the activity that a person is doing and what
Speaker 1: parts of the brain this activity needs to use. In
Speaker 1: a Yale University study found that no two brain connect
Speaker 1: domes are the same that when given MRI I images
Speaker 1: taken of the same several brains over the course of
Speaker 1: a few days, the connectivity fingerprint of each brain could
Speaker 1: help scientists match up the brain with a study participant
Speaker 1: with around accuracy. Then, in a study that appeared in
Speaker 1: the journal Science Advances in October, the scientists examined how
Speaker 1: long it actually took to capture a snapshot of a
Speaker 1: person's brain fingerprint. In the past, MRI images were captured
Speaker 1: over the course of several minutes, but the research team
Speaker 1: wondered if they could be taken in a shorter time.
Speaker 1: In a press release, researcher and Rico Amico said, until now,
Speaker 1: neuroscientists have identified brain finger prints using two m r
Speaker 1: I scans taken over a fairly long period. But do
Speaker 1: the fingerprints actually appear after just five seconds, for example,
Speaker 1: or do they need longer? And what a fingerprints of
Speaker 1: different brain areas appeared at different moments in time. Nobody
Speaker 1: knew the answer, so we tested different time scales to
Speaker 1: see what would happen. Amiko and his colleagues found that
Speaker 1: five seconds didn't cut it, but one minute and forty
Speaker 1: seconds was long enough to capture a brain fingerprint and
Speaker 1: further that an individual's unique brain map began appearing first
Speaker 1: in sensory areas of the brain, like those related to
Speaker 1: eye movement and visual perception and attention. Brain fingerprints and
Speaker 1: regions related to more complex functions like the frontal cortex
Speaker 1: developed over longer periods of time. The research team plans
Speaker 1: to compare the brain fingerprints of patients with Alzheimer's to
Speaker 1: those of healthy people, Amiko explained in the press release.
Speaker 1: Based on my initial findings, it seems that the features
Speaker 1: that make a brain fingerprint unique steadily disappear. As the
Speaker 1: disease progresses. It gets harder to identify people based on
Speaker 1: their connectomes. It's as if a person with Alzheimer's loses
Speaker 1: his or her brain identity. Knowing this could mean earlier
Speaker 1: detection of neurological conditions like autism, stroke, or dementia that
Speaker 1: might cause a brain fingerprint to disappear. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: based on the article our brains have fingerprints and we
Speaker 1: can find them fast on how stuff works dot Com,
Speaker 1: written by Jesslin Shields. Brain Stuff is production of by
Speaker 1: Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com,
Speaker 1: and it's produced by Tyler Klang four more podcasts from
Speaker 1: my heart Radio. Visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.