Hacking the Minds of Terrorists

Peter Rosenfeld, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has done a lot of work on P300 brain waves and how they can reveal hidden information. According to Rosenfeld, these brief electrical patterns in the cortex occur when meaningful information is shown to someone who has "guilty knowledge." The question is, then, could they be used to confirm critical details about a future terrorist attack once authorities have a suspect in hand?

To find out, Rosenfeld and graduate student John Meixner gave a group of volunteers information about a mock terrorist attack and then had them write a description of the plan so it would be encoded in their memory. Then the researchers attached electrodes to the scalps of the volunteers and measured their P300 brain activity while they watched information related to the planned attack, like the target city, flash on a computer screen. The results? If the attack was planned for Boston, say, the volunteers showed a larger P300 brain wave response when they saw that city flash on the screen than when they saw the names of other cities.

When the researchers knew the details of the planned attack in advance, they were able to correlate the brain waves with guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy. And without any advance knowledge, Rosenfeld explains in a write-up:

We were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime- related details. The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity.

We'll have to wait to see if the test holds water outside the lab, but Rosenfeld suspects that if the technique was used in the real world, where terrorists repeatedly rehearse the details of an attack, "the deeper encoding of planned crime-related knowledge could further boost detection of terrorist intentions."