The human brain is not immune to hackers. So says Ivan Martinovic, a computer scientist at the University of Oxford who is exploring whether brain wave-reading technology can covertly obtain the secret information we store in our heads. His tool? A $300 video game controller. For this study, Martinovic, along with researchers from California and Switzerland, developed a program that interfaces with an electroencephalograph (EEG) device identical to the ones that are marketed for gaming and entertainment. But instead of controlling a character on a screen, participants’ brain wave activity was imaged and analyzed as they were shown pictures of numbers, names, logos and people.
