No, this is NOT some geek's way of getting all mushy with his babe. This is actually what happens in human brain. Last week at my lab meeting I came across a very interesting article published in nature (courtesy, my advisor who happen to discuss it ). Here is a news article that talks about it. The title of the article reads "Jennifer Anniston strikes a nerve", she can strike a lot more things though, I have to say :).
The article is about how a few scientist at UCLA, MIT and a couple of other places got together conducted this research on some of the epileptic patients. The reason for choosing epileptic patients being none other than the fact that these patients already had electrodes planted in their brain as part of their treatment and they could use these electrodes for their single neuron recording. Ok I realize this is getting too technical, so I will cut the long story short.
They found that high up (in the hippocampus, for those interested) in the brain's hierarchical structure there are neurons that fire (that is to say that they recognize) every time they are shown pictures of famous personalities or places. In fact, the very same neurons fire even when you are just shown the name of the person/place and not the picture. Essentially, these neurons recognize the concept of a person/place. I am not educated enough to know all the implications of this, but I was totally amused at the way the concept of a person is laid out in your brain, the way memory is laid out and coded. I know for sure there are different areas for language and face processing or recognition which contain millions of neurons, but as you go higher up in the hierarchy, the information is integrated and all it takes is one firing neuron to conceptualize a personality. Intriguing, ain't it?
The article is about how a few scientist at UCLA, MIT and a couple of other places got together conducted this research on some of the epileptic patients. The reason for choosing epileptic patients being none other than the fact that these patients already had electrodes planted in their brain as part of their treatment and they could use these electrodes for their single neuron recording. Ok I realize this is getting too technical, so I will cut the long story short.
They found that high up (in the hippocampus, for those interested) in the brain's hierarchical structure there are neurons that fire (that is to say that they recognize) every time they are shown pictures of famous personalities or places. In fact, the very same neurons fire even when you are just shown the name of the person/place and not the picture. Essentially, these neurons recognize the concept of a person/place. I am not educated enough to know all the implications of this, but I was totally amused at the way the concept of a person is laid out in your brain, the way memory is laid out and coded. I know for sure there are different areas for language and face processing or recognition which contain millions of neurons, but as you go higher up in the hierarchy, the information is integrated and all it takes is one firing neuron to conceptualize a personality. Intriguing, ain't it?
2 comments:
I didn't read the article (lazy!) but it would be interesting to know if there's correlation between the spatial proximity of neurons in my brains and the real world connectedness of the people they represent. Do all gangasters fire off neurons in the same area? Do family members own a different clump of neurons? Do the George Bush and Dunston (checks in) neurons sit next to each other?
True, it would be something worth knowing. I am not sure if the logistics of the experiment would work out.
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