A team of American neuroscientists have discovered that your intelligence can be predicted fairly accurately with an fMRI brain scan.
Not only that, but they discovered that everyone's patterns of connections in the brain are unique - they act like a fingerprint, that can be used to identify a person even if no other information is available.
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| photo credit Stephen Hampshire |
Todd Constable, one of the authors of the study, told WIRED magazine that one day in the future, employers could scan job applicants' brains to see whether they would be suited for the position.
And Richard Haier, an intelligence researcher at the University of California, Irvine, said that schools could scan students' brains to see what kind of education would suit them, or prisons could scan inmates to see whether they were prone to violence or addiction.
Measuring something as abstract as intelligence and personality through brain scanning is naturally a difficult job, and the technology is in its very early days - but the potential for Minority Report-esque situations developing as the technology improves is posing a problem for medical ethicists, some of whom see situations where discrimination based on scan results could occur.
The kind of research conducted in this study could one day have major medical benefits, or lead to discrimination. For the foreseeable future however, it's another step in the journey of discovery into how our brains work.
