Professor reveals the 'Jennifer Aniston neuron'

Oct 29 2008

According to a top scientist parts of the brain are wired up to be devoted to celebrities.

Leading neuroscientist and bio-engineer, Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga has discovered the 'Jennifer Aniston neuron', a remarkable type of neuron in the brain fired in an 'abstract' manner to completely different pictures of familiar people.

Professor Quiroga also discovered that the firing of these neurons made it possible to actually tell what the subjects were seeing - literally reading their minds.

Professor Quiroga says understanding how information is represented by neurons in the brain is one of the major scientific challenges of our day and despite spectacular progress in the last few decades, comprehending how visual inputs are processed to create a conscious perception is still a long way off.

His main research interest is studying the principles of neural coding and since complex behaviour is encoded by the activity of large populations of neurons, he is working on the development of advanced methods to extract useful information from the data.

Professor Quiroga says he is examining how information about the external world - what we see, hear, touch - and our own internal representations - memories, emotions, etc. - is represented by neurons in the brain.

He says we can easily recognize a person in a fraction of a second, even when seen from different angles, with different sizes, colours, contrasts and under strikingly different conditions - but how neurons in the brain are capable of creating such an 'abstract' representation, disregarding basic visual details, is only starting to be known."

Professor Quiroga made the discovery after showing people being treated for epilepsy hundreds of pictures of famous people and landmarks - when tiny electrodes implanted as part of their treatment picked up the electrical activity or 'firing' of around 100 brain cells in each person.

Tests showed that one woman had a cell that specifically recognised pictures of Jennifer Aniston and people's brain cells appear to be encoded to store memories of individual celebrities such Bill Clinton, Halle Berry, Pamela Anderson, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise - famous landmarks also had their own cells.

The study also showed that the same person can have a number of cells devoted to different celebrities or landmarks.

Professor Quiroga promises to describe how his research has high clinical potential for the development of NeuroProsthetic devices, such as robotic arms driven by neural signals to be used by paralyzed patients and says his discovery has far-reaching implications - not only for the development of neuronal prostheses, but for treatment of patients with epilepsy, Alzheimer's and schizophrenia and also for further understanding how perceptions and memories are represented in the brain.

Professor Quiroga will reveal all about the 'Jennifer Aniston neuron' during his inaugural Professorial lecture on Tuesday 4 November at at the University of Leicester.