What can one say?
The idea is simply this: have your brain mapped by sensors (here, an EEG or Electroencephalograph is used), which pick up crucial brain activity and then sophisticated software can help understand what it is that the brain is trying to do! These are called ‘brain-computer interfaces’ (or BCI’s) for obvious reasons.
These can actually help you mentally control your computer using specific thought patterns.
What is interesting is how a computer can browse through your mental database and steal away some pieces of sensitive information. Security researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Geneva and University of California, Berkeley have developed a program to be used by the software that has only one purpose – finding information like home address, debit card PIN and date of birth. They found 28 willing participants, who didn’t know about the hacking (of course, otherwise the whole exercise is futile, right?) and tested this program on them. The success rate varied from a mere 10% to a respectable 40% for different fields of sensitive data.
The technique is a lot like hacking passwords. The key response tracked by the program is known as a P300 response – the brainwave activity that the brain undergoes when it recognizes something familiar, like a known face, own neighbourhood, own debit card PIN and so on! The peaks in the P300 activity were noted and the analysis of this data can give a very good indication of what the right answers are!