CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

2.

DEFINITION TECHNIQUE

ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY

. SOURCES OF EEG ACTIVITIES

. EEG Vs FMRI & PET . METHOD

3. ROLE

IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS

4. PHASES OF BRAIN FINGERPRINTING . PHASE 1: INVESTIGATION

. PHASE 2: INTERVIEW OF THE SUBJECT . PHASE 3: SCIENTIFIC TESTING PHASE4: ADJUDICATION

5. CURRENT USES AND APPLICATION MEDICAL FIELD COUNTER TERRORISM CRIMINAL JUSTICE ADVERTISING APPLICATIONS . OTHER APPLICATIONS 6.

LIMITATIONS

7. COMPARISON WITH OTHER TECHNOLOGIES 8. ADMISSBLITY OF BRAINFINGERPRINTING INCOURT 9. RECORD OF 100% ACCURACY
10. CONCLUSION 11. REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION
Brain fingerprinting" is a computer-based test that is designed todiscover, document, and provide evidence of guilty knowledge regardingcrimes, and identify members of dormant terrorist cells. Brainfingerprinting is a technique that measures recognition of familiar stimuliby measuring electrical brain wave responses to words, phrases, or pictures that are presented on a computer screen. Brain fingerprintingwas invented be Lawrence Farwell. The theory is that the suspect'sreaction to the details of an event or activity will reflect if the suspect hadprior knowledge of the event or activity.This test uses what Farwell calls the MERMER ("Memory and EncodingRelated Multifaceted Electroencephalographic Response") response todetect familiarity reaction.One of the applications is lie detection . Dr. Lawrence A. Farwell hasinvented, developed, proven, and patented the technique of FarwellBrain Fingerprinting, a new computer-based technology to identifythe perpetrator of a crime accurately and scientifically by measuring brainwave responses to crime-relevant words or pictures presented ona computer screen. Farwell Brain Fingerprinting has proven 100%accurate in over 120 tests, including tests on FBI agents, tests for aUS intelligence agency and for the US Navy , and tests on real-lifesituations including actual crimes.1.1 What is Brain Fingerprinting?Brain Fingerprinting is designed to determine whether an individualrecognizes specific information related to an event or activity bymeasuring electrical brain wave responses to words, phrases, or pictures presented on a computer screen. The technique can be appliedonly in situations where investigators have a sufficient amount of specificinformation about an event or activity that would be known only to theperpetrator and investigator. In this respect, Brain Fingerprinting isconsidered a type of Guilty Knowledge Test, where the "guilty" party isexpected to react assessing the validity of a suspect's "guilty" knowledgerely on measurement of autonomic arousal (e.g., palm sweating andheart rate), while Brain Fingerprinting measures electrical brain activity

via a fitted headband containing special sensors. Brain Fingerprinting issaid to be more accurate in detecting "guilty" knowledge distinct from thefalse positives of traditional polygraph methods, but this is hotly disputedby specialized researchers .

TECHNIQUE
Brain Fingerprinting testing detects information stored in the human brain. A specific,electrical brain wave response, known as a P300, is emitted by the brain within afraction of a second when an individual recognizes and processes an incomingstimulus that is significant or noteworthy. When an irrelevant stimulus is seen, it isseen as being insignificant and not noteworthy and a P300 is not emitted.The P300 electrical brain wave response is widely known and accepted in thescientific community. There have been hundreds of studies conducted and articlespublished on it over the past thirty years. In his research on the P300 response, Dr.Farwell discovered that the P300 was one aspect of a larger brain-wave responsethat he named a MERMER(memory and encoding related multifacetedelectroencephalographic response). The MERMER comprises a P300 response,occurring 300 to 800 ms after the stimulus, and additional patterns occurring morethan 800 ms after the stimulus, providing even more accurate results.

Scientific Procedure
Brain Fingerprinting testing incorporates the following procedure. A sequence of words, pictures or sounds is presented under computer control for a fraction of second each. Three types of stimuli are presented: "targets," "irrelevant," and"probes." The targets consist of information known to the suspect, which willestablish a baseline brain response (MERMER) for information known to besignificant to this suspect in the context of the crime. The subject is given a list of thetarget stimuli and instructed to press a particular button in response to targets andanother button in response to all other stimuli. Most of the non-target stimuli areirrelevant, having no relation to the situation under investigation. These irrelevant donot elicit a MERMER, and therefore establish a baseline brain response for information that is not significant to this suspect in the context of this crime. Some of the non-target stimuli are relevant to the situation under investigation. These relevantstimuli are referred to as probes; information relevant to the crime. For a subject withknowledge of the investigated situation, the probes are noteworthy due to thatknowledge, and hence the probes elicit a MERMER, indicating "information present" information stored in the brain. For a subject lacking this knowledge,

probes areindistinguishable from the irrelevant, and thus probes do not elicit a MERMER,indicating "information absent" information not stored in the brain. When theinformation tested is crime-relevant and known only to the perpetrator investigators,then "information present" implies participation in the crime and "information absent"implies nonparticipation. Similarly, when the information tested is information knownonly to members of a particular organization or group (e.g., an intelligence agency or a terrorist group), then "information present" indicates an informed affiliation with thegroup in question.

Computer Controlled The entire Brain Fingerprinting system is under computer control, includingpresentationof the stimuli, recording of electrical brain activity, a mathematical data analysisalgorithm that compares the responses to the three types of stimuli and produces adetermination of "information present" or "information absent," and a statisticalconfidence level for this determination. At no time during the analysis do biases andinterpretations of a system expert affect the presentation or the results of thestimulus presentation.

ELECTROENCEPHALOG RAPHY
: Electroencephalography (EEG) is the measurement of electrical activity produced bythe brain as recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp. Just as the activity in acomputer can be understood on multiple levels, from the activity of individualtransistors to the function of applications, so can the electrical activity of the brain bedescribed on relatively small to relatively large scales. At one end are actionpotentials in a single axon or currents within a single dendrite of a single neuron, andat the other end is the activity measured by the EEG which aggregates the electricvoltage fields from millions of neurons. So-called scalp EEG is collected from tens tohundreds of electrodes positioned on different locations at the surface of the head.EEG signals (in the range of milli-volts) are amplified and digitalized for later processing. The data measured by the scalp EEG are used for clinical and researchpurposes.

SOURCE OF EEG ACTIVITY:

Scalp EEG activity oscillates at multiple frequencies having different characteristicspatial distributions associated with different states of brain functioning such aswaking and sleeping. These oscillations represent synchronized activity over anetwork of neurons. The neuronal networks underlying some of these oscillations areunderstood (such as the thalamocortical resonance underlying sleep spindles) whilemany others are not (e.g. the system that generates

red from the scalp [2] and is about 1020 mV whenmeasured from subdural electrodes. In digital EEG systems, the amplified signal isdigitized via an analog-to-digital converter, after being passed through an anti-

aliasing filter. Since an EEG voltage signal represents a difference between thevoltages at two electrodes, the display of the EEG for the reading encephalographer may be set up in one of several ways. 2.2 EEG VS FMRI AND PET: EEG has several strong sides as a tool of exploring brain activity; for example, itstime resolution is very high (on the level of a single millisecond). Other methods of looking at brain activity, such as PET and FMRI have time resolution betweenseconds and minutes. EEG measures the brain's electrical activity directly, whileother methods record changes in blood flow (e.g., SPECT, FMRI) or metabolicactivity (e.g., PET), which are indirect markers of brain electrical activity. EEG can beused simultaneously with FMRI so that high-temporal resolution data can berecorded at the same time as high-spatial-resolution data; however, since the dataderived from each occurs over a different time course, the data sets do notnecessarily represent the exact same brain activity. There are technical difficultiesassociated with combining these two modalities like currents can be induced inmoving EEG electrode wires due to the magnetic field of the MRI. EEG can berecorded at the same time as MEG so that data from these complimentary high-time-resolution techniques can be combined. Magneto-encephalography (MEG) is animaging technique used to measure the magnetic fields produced by electricalactivity in the brain via extremely sensitive devices such as superconductingquantum interference devices (SQUIDs). These measurements are commonly usedin both research and clinical settings. There are many uses for the MEG, includingassisting surgeons in localizing pathology, assisting researchers in determining thefunction of various parts of the brain, neurofeedback, and others.