Science is fun!

[hazelk]

For reasons best known to my non-existent therapist I’ve been playing a game of seeing how long it’s possible to go without renewing my identity card at work. 5 years and rising but today got rumbled by the new electronic security system at the main science library. So if it’s only possible to access the journals electronically does that mean my computer is a recognized university employee but I’m not?

Still, while scanning for a half remembered article came across this description of a fun piece of work on neural processing.

“It takes moments for the human brain to recognize a person or an object even if seen under very different conditions. This raises the question: can a single neuron respond selectively to a given face regardless of view, age, pose or context? That question — it has been called the search for the 'grandmother neuron' — is difficult to test. But now, in patients with intractable epilepsy who were implanted with depth electrodes for a clinical process, an answer has been obtained. Patients were asked to respond to images on computer screens, and the results showed that neurons are pretty single-minded in what they respond to. For instance, one neuron will respond selectively to different pictures of the actress Jennifer Aniston, one to basketball player Michael Jordan, and another to different views of the Tower of Pisa.”

It seems to be related to the way memories are organised, the JA neuron will also respond to pictures of Lisa Kudrow but not Jen when she’s with Brad. Have to wonder how they got consent for the work. “ Oh and while we’ve got these electrodes stuck inside your brain instead of actually doing anything to help with your epilepsy we want to use you to find the neuron that can tell Michael Jordan from the Leaning Tower of Pisa?”

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I guess you just hope enough epileptics are science geeky enough to say "yes, sure" :-). But of course this could mean the results are not applicable to most humans.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Geek neurophysiology. I do worry about the sample sizes with some of these sorts of studies. All the MRI based work on which brain region is active during which activity, for example. It's probably a bit much coming from a developmental biologist but we don't generally have to use stats to see our effects.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Geek neurophysiology.

Yes, that. Just think of all the psych studies that need large disclaimers at the beginning: this effect was observed in college students.

[yourlibrarian]

I remember seeing this news bit a while back. I remember thinking this would be fascinating for cognitive psych theories on how the brain organizes info. And sometimes they discover things by accident while in the process of developing other things. This seems especially true in chemistry.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the news and views guy seemd disapointed that it wasn't a visual processing thing but memory organisation sounds even more interesting. I wonder if neuron defined groupings match with how the subjects would categorise the pictures if asked to do it consciously. Or if the same neuron would fire for a different set of stimuli a few days later or in another context. Plus loads of other experiments involving rows of epilectics staring at TV screens like something out of Minority Report. Well maybe not that so much.