Kiran Bedi and Brain Fingerprinting

Kiran Bedi and Brain Fingerprinting
Prof Dr P Chandra Sekharan
The Indian Express [Bangalore 24.5.2010] carried in its ‘The Edit Page’ as one among its three customary quotes the following statement made by Kiran Bedi on Apex court judgment on brain mapping and polygraph on suspects is illegal
“Brain mapping test provides 100 percent correct results and is a most effective tool these days for investigating agencies.......”
I was more shocked than surprised to read such a tall claim made by the celebrated police officer from India.
I am not surprised when Sachin appears in the ads saying that he gets his energy from Boost. Nor have I ever taken seriously what cinema actresses say in TV ads that ‘this cream or that cream’ is 100 percent guaranteed to make one’s black skin fair in seven days.
I do remember about a soap ad that used to appear in every paper and magazine during yester years. A very famous and pretty actress who was our neighbour and very closely known to us will appear in the ad declaring that ‘this is the soap that gives beauty to the cine actresses’. My sister knows for sure that this actress never uses any soap for that matter but only the powder made from green-gram. The actress would take the ad money but distribute the soaps to her friends. It used to be a big amusement for all of us to joke ‘this soap can give beauty only to actresses and not to other ordinary women.
Unlike the above actress, Sachin would have indeed tasted ‘Boost beverage’ besides receiving huge ad money. Honestly it is not my intention to club Kiran Bedi’s statement with the above soap ads. Nithyananda has been discredited as a cheat but still there are a quite a few who believe that he has some supernatural power.
The professionally qualified bodies sans any hidden agenda like the Forensic Science Society of India, the Indian Psychiatric Association, the Indian Medical Ethics Group, the media, human rights’ organisations, the majority top cops, academics and intelligentsia have dubbed with enough and convincing proof brain fingerprinting and the associated primitive techniques as unscientific.
But Kiran Bedi has not simply supported brain fingerprinting, but claimed that the test provides 100 percent correct results, a claim not made even by Farwell. Certainly she may not belong to that category of persons who believe that they can say anything because they are famous. Has she to her credit any case successfully investigated using brain fingerprinting as a most effective tool or what she said is merely an impulsive statement?
Whatever may be the reason for making such a misleading statement, I thought it would be prudent to make her, as well as those who tend to believe what she has said, understand the truth behind this technique.
America, where brain fingerprinting was first proposed by Lawrence A. Farwell a psychologist during 1995, dumped it as Potemkin Science. There are no takers for this test anywhere in the world. In India, the Brain Fingerprinting research, to put it mildly, is a hoax.

Its two main psychologist defenders are from Bangalore and Ahmadabad whose careers bloomed under Dr C.R. Mukundan whose attempts at brain fingerprinting research began in 2001 at the controversial Bangalore FSL using those accused of criminal acts shepherded by the police for ‘voluntary research’ as guinea pigs with or without the consent of the persons concerned. In 2003, Dr Mukundan left Bangalore unceremoniously and settled in Ahmadabad.

Both the groups currently credited with national fame or infamy as one’s intellect pronounces – merely copied Farwell’s technique but gave their ‘findings’ different names to circumvent patent rights. As expected, each group debunked the other’s ‘technique’.

The Bangalore FSL group termed its technique as ‘brain-mapping’ claiming its details were perfected in 1992 in a Canadian University – i.e. a full three years before Farwell!

The Ahmadabad group credited its technique’s invention/ development to Dr Mukundan and called it ‘brain electrical oscillation signature profiling’ (BEOS).

Dr. Mukundan managed to fabricate BEOS machines and marketed them to unsuspecting buyers – a track record that earned him the post of Advisor, Directorate of Forensic Science, Ministry of Home Affairs [DFSMHA].

Before long the questionable details began stinking to high heaven.

As a result, DFSMHA appointed a committee chaired by the Vice Chancellor Director, NIMHANS to examine the scientific validity of the brain fingerprinting technique practiced by these two groups.

In spite of the fact that NIMHANS was the training ground of the aforesaid questionable groups from Bangalore and Ahmadabad the NIMHANS Committee declared both the techniques as “unscientific” and recommended their “immediate discontinuance”.

Both the groups make use of the EEG machine to detect the scalp electrical signal outputs.

EEG has several limitations. Most important is its poor spatial resolution.
EEG is most sensitive to a particular set of post-synaptic potentials: those which are generated in superficial layers of the cortex, on the crests of gyri directly abutting the skull and radial to the skull.
Dendrites which are deeper in the cortex, inside sulci, in midline or deep structures (such as the cingulate gyrus or hippocampus), or producing currents which are tangential to the skull, have far less contribution to the EEG signal.
The meninges, cerebrospinal fluid and skull "smear" the EEG signal, obscuring its intracranial source.
It is mathematically impossible to reconstruct a unique intracranial current source for a given EEG signal, as some currents produce potentials that cancel each other out.
In the common man’s language, an EEG test is comparable to the knowledge gleaned by a soccer fan sitting outside a football stadium without seeing any of the activity inside but making reasonable guesses about the course of the game based on hearing the fluctuating roars of the crowd.

The ‘vantage point’ does not allow the fan to discern or deduce even a minor fraction of the game’s finer details or the paths of its progress.

How can our non-medical psychologists claim to read reactions of the brain with the help of an EEG to pinpoint the guilty and pronounce their findings, after such a ‘scientific test’ evidently comparable to the football fan above, legally acceptable?

As I do not apprehend any ulterior motive on the part of Kiran Bedi , I am led to think that she has swallowed the sugar-coated arguments put forth by the pseudo scientists group as well as the corrupt and/or misinformed elements within our national police hierarchy, without making even as a cursory check!