It's essentially the same idea, except that you elicit a particular brainwave signal only when recognizing something you've already seen. I believe India experimented with using it in murder trials a few years ago-- if the accused elicits a P300 upon seeing the actual murder weapon amongst a line-up of dozens of other weapons, they must know a priori how the murder took place and hence be guilty. Interesting times and there really are applications that could benefit from this kind of analysis.
Between Paul Ekman's work in behavioral science and detecting a persons pulse rate from video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONZcjs1Pjmk), it seems like one could have a pretty decent "lie detector" running on a smart phone.