My poor brain is taxed with having to remember a variety of passwords and passcodes; oh, the joys of technology and modern living! Thanks to some research currently being done in Canada, however, my scrambling to remember a password might become a thing of the past. My brain won't be off the hook, mind you; it's just that instead of having to remember a specific password, it will merely have to react in a specific way to stimuli while some high-tech mind-reader does the rest.
Apparently, brain waves are as individual as fingerprints; and the subsequent hypothesis is that a machine that could both monitor and recognise a user's brain wave patterns could be used for security purposes.
It's an important distinction (to me, at least, as I like to keep the contents of my brain private) that the proposed application would not literally read your mind - it would merely respond to the brain's reaction to questions, photos, music, and so forth, and then provide access accordingly. Even still, if the idea of computers directly accessing your brain activity in this way puts you in the fascinated-but-frightened camp (it does me), you needn't get your tin foil hats out just yet. The process is still in the developmental stages, and it may be decades before it has any practical application. -[Star C. Foster]
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