[FulcrumPilot]

Jennifer Aniston strikes a nerve
Roxanne Khamsi
Single brain cells show selective response to specific celebrity photos.

Is a single cell in your brain devoted to Jennifer Aniston or Bill Clinton? Maybe so, according to new research.

A recent experiment showed that single neurons in people's brains react to the faces of specific people. Researchers see the findings as evidence that our brains use fewer cells to decode a given image than previously thought.

The subject of visual processing has sparked much scientific speculation in the past. Exactly how our brains extract meaning from an image remains unclear. At one end of the spectrum of possibilities, a network of cells would process various bits of information in a scene and piece it all together to form an understandable picture.

At the other extreme, the brain would contain a separate neuron to recognize each and every object in the world. Neurobiologist Jerome Lettvin coined the term 'grandmother cell' to parody this view, as it would mean that the brain contains a specific cell to recognize one's own grandmother.

Very few experts believe that grandmother cells exist. But that did not dissuade Rodrigo Quian Quiroga of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues from investigating single neurons in the brain, to find out how devoted they might be to single people or objects.

Fired up

The study involved eight patients suffering from epilepsy, all of whom had been temporarily implanted with devices to monitor brain-cell activity as part of their treatment. Quian Quiroga and colleagues took advantage of this opportunity to monitor the firing behaviour of their neurons.

In this case it almost seems to be a cell that responds the concept of Halle Berry as it were. But nobody's saying that it's a grandmother cell.

Using a laptop, they presented the subjects with a series of one-second snapshots of celebrities, animals, objects and landmark buildings. Each person was shown a total of almost 2,000 pictures; in each sitting they saw about 90 pictures showing roughly a dozen distinct items.

The recordings taken as they viewed the photographs revealed just how selective cells within the medial temporal lobe - located deep inside the brain- can be. For example, a neuron of one patient responded almost solely to different pictures of Bill Clinton.

The researchers say that these types of cell are involved in sophisticated aspects of visual processing to identify a person, for example, rather than just a simple shape.

Acting on cue

Various pictures of Jennifer Aniston elicited a response in a single neuron inside the medial temporal lobe of another patient. Interestingly, images of her with her former husband Brad Pitt did not sway this cell, the authors of the paper report. Their findings appear this week in the journal Nature1.

Quian Quiroga also found that a lone neuron in one subject responded selectively to various pictures of the actress Halle Berry - as well as drawings of her and her name written down. Other cells were found to respond to images of characters in The Simpsons or members of The Beatles.

The team thinks that these brain cells probably respond to a range of different items, but that this limited study didn't include all the various pictures that might make a particular cell light up.

Despite appearing to find a 'Halle Berry cell', notes Martin Tovee, a neuroscientist at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, who has conducted similar research in monkeys, "nobody's saying that it's a grandmother cell".

Nevertheless, the researchers say the results hint that we might use fewer brain cells to recognize familiar objects than previously thought.

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/0506...0620-7_pf.html

[turtle777]

Uhm, yeah, and so what ?

+1

-t

[Mithras]

I remember learning about the "grandmother cell hypothesis." Very interesting.
What'd really be spooky is if Halle Berry, Jennifer Aniston, and Bill Clinton were the only three stimuli that lit up one particular cell. What would they have in common?

[TETENAL]

So if drink away my Jennifer Aniston cell, do I forget who this person is?

By the way, who is this? Serviously. I never heard of this person.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by TETENAL

So if drink away my Jennifer Aniston cell, do I forget who this person is?

By the way, who is this? Serviously. I never heard of this person.

You ALREADY drank it away

-t

[insha]

I guess now we can move on to eliminating hunger and poverty, huh.

+1

[DeathMan]

Originally Posted by insha

I guess now we can move on to eliminating hunger and poverty, huh.

+1

Until hunger, poverty and all diseases are cured, there is no reason to learn or research anything else in this world. Everyone, stop your jobs, fight hunger and poverty.

Do you spend every waking moment fighting these? Didn't think so.

[FulcrumPilot]

Originally Posted by insha

I guess now we can move on to eliminating hunger and poverty, huh.

+1

BTW, "starvation diet" (low calories) makes you live longer, so research on hunger is important as well!

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by TETENAL

So if drink away my Jennifer Aniston cell, do I forget who this person is?

By the way, who is this? Serviously. I never heard of this person.

[insha]

Originally Posted by DeathMan

Until hunger, poverty and all diseases are cured, there is no reason to learn or research anything else in this world. Everyone, stop your jobs, fight hunger and poverty.

Do you spend every waking moment fighting these? Didn't think so.

So you want to tell me what good this research did? I am more than willing to accept it as useful, if in fact it is.

[Mithras]

Originally Posted by insha

So you want to tell me what good this research did? I am more than willing to accept it as useful, if in fact it is.

It contributed to our understanding of the brain's visual processing works. This is a vast and complicated topic; the fact that they used famous celebrities as visual stimuli was incidental.

[insha]

Originally Posted by Mithras

It contributed to our understanding of the brain's visual processing works. This is a vast and complicated topic; the fact that they used famous celebrities as visual stimuli was incidental.

Thanks Mithras.

I guess since you put it this way, I can see it being useful when working with Autism. If this is so, why didn't they (the research people) say that in the first place.

The article makes their research looks frivolous (hence my original comment) without actually saying what this could be good for, like Autism, for instance.

Edit: DeathMan, take note.

[JoshuaZ]

hmm... I wouldn't mind getting oral from two of them, and one got oral... hmm.... (NOTE: I do not want oral from Clinton)

[lavar78]

All three are rather charismatic.

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by lavar78

All three are rather charismatic.

You have obviously never saw the first Leprechaun movie.

[FulcrumPilot]

Originally Posted by insha

The article makes their research looks frivolous (hence my original comment) without actually saying what this could be good for, like Autism, for instance.

You will not be interested in any of these topics, I presume, because I don't think they care about autism when they would like to study something for the sake of just understanding how normal things work!

[lavar78]

Originally Posted by KevinK

You have obviously never saw the first Leprechaun movie.

Unfortunately, I have.

BTW. that should be "seen."

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by lavar78

BTW. that should be "seen."

Who cares? My point made.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by KevinK

Who cares? My point made.

Everytime you mis-spell, God's kills a kitt..., uhm, no, wait. Scratch that...

-t

[lavar78]

Originally Posted by KevinK

Who cares?

I do, which is why I said something.

[insha]

Originally Posted by FulcrumPilot

You will not be interested in any of these topics, I presume, because I don't think they care about autism when they would like to study something for the sake of just understanding how normal things work!

You misunderstood what I said. I was using Autism as an example.

[FulcrumPilot]

Originally Posted by insha

You misunderstood what I said. I was using Autism as an example.

`

Ok substitue autism with any other disease, it won't help not misunderstand you.

[ManOfSteal]

They all have nice breasts. Yes, even Halle Berry does.

[FulcrumPilot]

Originally Posted by ManOfSteal

Yes, even Halle Berry does.

Man-made ones, is what she has.

[Mithras]

By the way, here's an article about the "Grandmother Cell" theory. It's by a former professor of mine.

EDIT: The full-text access is restricted, so I've quoted a few bits from the article:

The term “grandmother cell” refers to a neuron that would respond only to a specific, complex, and meaningful stimulus, that is, to a single percept or even a single concept. As originally conceived, a grandmother cell was multimodal, but the term came to be used mostly for representing a visual percept. As we shall see, the term arose because the first such neuron was postulated to represent a grandmother. There might be many grandmother cells responding to a specific stimulus, such as one grandmother, but their response properties would be the same. Because of this redundancy, the loss of a grandmother cell or two might not result in loss of the percept. “Coding by grandmother cells” is at the other extreme from “ensemble,” “coarse,” or “population” coding in which a grandmother or other stimulus is coded by the pattern of activity over a group of neurons.

In ensemble coding, there are no “grandmother cells” that detect the unique collection of features that characterize a grandmother. Rather, each member of the ensemble responds somewhat differently, for example, to a granny’s wrinkles, white hair, or to several different old women; the coding of a specific grandmother is done by a unique pattern of activation across the ensemble.

Jerry Lettvin and the Birth of Mother and Grandmother Cells

Jerry Lettvin originated the term “grandmother cell” around 1969 (Barlow 1995) in his M.I.T. course titled “Biological Foundations for Perception and Knowledge.” When discussing the problem of how neurons can represent individual objects, he told a (tall) tale of how the neurosurgeon A. Akakhievitch had located a group of brain cells that “responded uniquely only to a mother . . . whether animate or stuffed, seen from before or behind, upside down or on a diagonal or offered by caricature, photograph or abstraction.”

At this point, Lettvin introduced the mother-obsessed character from Philip Roth’s (1969) novel Portnoy’s Complaint and Akakhievitch ablated all of the mother cells in Portnoy’s brain. As a result, Portnoy completely lost the concept of his mother (see Box 1). Akakhievitch then went on to the study of grandmother cells. From this origin, the term grandmother cell seems to have spread so quickly that Horace Barlow in his 1972 article “Single Units and Sensation: A Neuron Doctrine for Perceptual Psychology” didn’t even explicitly define the term in criticizing the idea and, in 1973, Colin Blakemore could write of the “great debate [that] has become known as the question of the ‘grandmother cell.’ Do you really have a certain nerve cell for recognizing the concatenation of features representing your grandmother?”

[Cadaver]

There's more than one neuron firing when I see a picture of Jennifer Aniston

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by lavar78

I do, which is why I said something.

Well then private message this person and tell him.

[lavar78]

Originally Posted by KevinK

Well then private message this person and tell him.

I was already replying to something you said. That was just an aside. Do with it what you like.