Famous Names Get Single Neurons Fired Up
MONDAY, July 27 (HealthDay News) -- As you read her name, your Oprah neuron will probably rev up.
An international team of researchers has found that single neurons in the brain's hippocampus activate when people recognize a photo or name, even if the image or name is distorted or presented in less than perfect fashion.
"Different pictures of Marilyn Monroe can evoke the same mental image, even if greatly modified as in [Andy] Warhol's famous portraits," lead researcher Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, head of bioengineering at the University of Leicester in England, said in a news release. "This process relates to one of the most fascinating questions in neuroscience: How do neurons in the brain manage to abstract and disregard irrelevant details to recognize highly variable pictures as the same person?"
While people process visual and auditory information through separate pathways, the information appears to converge in the hippocampus, a section of the brain associated with long-term memory and spatial navigation, according to the researchers' article appearing online July 23 in Current Biology and in print on Aug. 11.
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