India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from a controversial brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.

With the Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test, or BEOS, an investigator reads aloud details of the crime and the resulting EEG brain images are processed using software that tries to detect whether, when the crime’s details are recited, the brain lights up in specific regions — the areas that, according to the technology’s inventors, show measurable changes when experiences are relived.

Many experts in psychology and neuroscience were troubled that it was used to win a criminal conviction before being validated by any independent study and reported in a respected scientific journal.