Mar 26, 2025 06:51 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 26, 2025 06:51 PM by C C.)
https://www.salon.com/2025/03/25/what-ma...d-the-key/
INTRO: You probably have a general understanding of the human brain: a network of nerve cells connected by synapses. Complex or abstract ideas emerge as a result of the firing of many of these nerve cells, or neurons. This means that a concept or memory or idea is the result of a distributed pattern of neural activity.
In contrast to computer memory, which always follows the same pattern of 1s and 0s, it's more like networks in our brain weave a new tapestry every time we think about something. This understanding is common to most of us lay people who know a little about neurology and the brain, or who are interested in AI and the attempts to replicate human intelligence.
Unfortunately, you may be badly out of date. As it turns out, in human brains, we also have a specialized type of cell called a concept neuron, which does what was long thought to be impossible: each of these cells encodes entire concepts, so that that single neuron fires whenever you’re exposed to a stimulus relating to that concept, or even when you think about it without an external stimulus.
This would be like having a single neuron that fires when you see a photograph of your grandmother, hear her voice, read her name or perhaps even smell her familiar perfume. This single neuron thus has semantic invariance for the concept of your grandmother. This means that it fires whenever your grandmother is the topic of thought, regardless of the context or medium or the sense that stimulates your thought of her.
Dr. Florian Mormann, a physician and researcher who heads a working group on cognitive and clinical neurophysiology at the University of Bonn, told Salon in a video interview that “textbooks of neuroscience that still exist today often mention the grandmother neuron as an example of something you would never find in a brain. Because clearly, it would be so much more efficient to simply have a network of eight neurons if it can do the same job as 70 different neurons. So it seemed a no-brainer for everyone that there shouldn’t be grandmother neurons in any brain”.
And yet, the no-brainer is seemingly wrong about the brain. As it turns out, grandmother neurons, or concept cells as they’re now known (or Jennifer Aniston neurons as they were called for a bit, as we’ll see) have been right there in our brains all along. And some scientists have known they are there, gradually learning more about them and their implications, over the past 20 years.
It’s not a conspiracy: the news just hasn’t really trickled out to the rest of us. That’s partly because most scientists who physically get right inside skulls to study the brains inside them do so with the brains of non-human animals, so most brain research we hear about still doesn’t involve these neurons, which it seems exist exclusively in the human brain... (MORE - details)
INTRO: You probably have a general understanding of the human brain: a network of nerve cells connected by synapses. Complex or abstract ideas emerge as a result of the firing of many of these nerve cells, or neurons. This means that a concept or memory or idea is the result of a distributed pattern of neural activity.
In contrast to computer memory, which always follows the same pattern of 1s and 0s, it's more like networks in our brain weave a new tapestry every time we think about something. This understanding is common to most of us lay people who know a little about neurology and the brain, or who are interested in AI and the attempts to replicate human intelligence.
Unfortunately, you may be badly out of date. As it turns out, in human brains, we also have a specialized type of cell called a concept neuron, which does what was long thought to be impossible: each of these cells encodes entire concepts, so that that single neuron fires whenever you’re exposed to a stimulus relating to that concept, or even when you think about it without an external stimulus.
This would be like having a single neuron that fires when you see a photograph of your grandmother, hear her voice, read her name or perhaps even smell her familiar perfume. This single neuron thus has semantic invariance for the concept of your grandmother. This means that it fires whenever your grandmother is the topic of thought, regardless of the context or medium or the sense that stimulates your thought of her.
Dr. Florian Mormann, a physician and researcher who heads a working group on cognitive and clinical neurophysiology at the University of Bonn, told Salon in a video interview that “textbooks of neuroscience that still exist today often mention the grandmother neuron as an example of something you would never find in a brain. Because clearly, it would be so much more efficient to simply have a network of eight neurons if it can do the same job as 70 different neurons. So it seemed a no-brainer for everyone that there shouldn’t be grandmother neurons in any brain”.
And yet, the no-brainer is seemingly wrong about the brain. As it turns out, grandmother neurons, or concept cells as they’re now known (or Jennifer Aniston neurons as they were called for a bit, as we’ll see) have been right there in our brains all along. And some scientists have known they are there, gradually learning more about them and their implications, over the past 20 years.
It’s not a conspiracy: the news just hasn’t really trickled out to the rest of us. That’s partly because most scientists who physically get right inside skulls to study the brains inside them do so with the brains of non-human animals, so most brain research we hear about still doesn’t involve these neurons, which it seems exist exclusively in the human brain... (MORE - details)
