Reading terrorists' minds maybe soon possible

Imagine technology that will allow law enforcement officials to get inside the mind of a terrorist to know how, when and where the next attack will occur. Well, it could soon be a reality, say scientists.

A team at Northwestern University has developed a new test which they claim if employed for a real-world scenario -- like an imminent terrorist attack -- could enable the police to confirm details about an attack, like date, location, and even weapons.

In their study, when the scientists knew in advance the specifics of the planned attacks by the "terrorists", they were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the laboratory, according to Prof J Peter Rosenfeld, who led the team.

For the first time, the scientists used the P300 testing in a mock terrorism scenario in which the subjects are planning, rather than perpetrating, a crime. The P300 brain waves were measured by electrodes attached to the scalp of the make-believe "persons of interest" in the laboratory.

The most intriguing part of the study in terms of real-word implications, Rosenfeld said, is that even when the researchers had no advance details about mock terrorism plans, the technology was still accurate in identifying critical concealed information.

"Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime-related details," Rosenfeld said.

He added: "The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity."

For the study, participants -- 29 students -- planned a mock attack based on information they were given about bombs and other weapons. They then had to write a letter detailing the rationale of their plan to encode information in memory.

Then, with electrodes attached to their scalps, they looked at a computer display monitor that presented names of stimuli. The names of Boston, Houston, New York, Chicago and Phoenix, for example, were shuffled and presented at random.

The city that study participants chose for the major terrorist attack evoked the largest P300 brainwave responses.

The test includes four classes of stimuli known as targets, non-targets, probes and irrelevants. Targets are sights, sounds or other stimuli the person being questioned already knows or is taught to recognize before the test.

Probes are stimuli only a guilty suspect would be likely to know. And irrelevants are stimuli unlikely to be recognized.

"Since 9/11 preventing terrorism is a priority. Our hope is that our new complex protocol -- different from the first P300 technology developed in the 1980s -- will one day confirm such chatter in the real world.