Connections in the Brain, Like Fingerprints, Can Identify Individuals

This image shows the functional connections in the brain that tend to be most discriminating of individuals. (Credit: Emily Finn) Each person is unique. You can identify people by their DNA, fingerprints, personal preferences and behavior. But new research out of Yale University has shown we have another unique identifier: How our brains work. “We all have this intuition that people are unique. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, our quirks and personalities, what we’re good at and how we handle things,” says study co-first author Emily Finn, a pHD student in neuroscience at Yale. “It’s very easy to observe that from the outside … but it’s been pretty hard to find correlates in brain activities.” And yet, it is the brain that makes all those differences possible. Knowing this, Finn and co-first author Xilin Shen, an associate research scientist at Yale, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to see if our brains each have a unique “fingerprint” that could distinguish one person from another.