Grandma Neurons, Jennifer Aniston and Catwoman

In 1960, neuroscientist Jerry Lettvin proposed that people had specific nerve cells that corresponded to a single concept, such as their grandmother. That is, inside your head you have one specific nerve cell that represents your grandmother, another that represents your grandfather, and so on. The idea of these very specific nerve cells, called grandmother neurons, was quickly dismissed as overly simplistic.

Fast forward to 2005, where in the article “ Why your brain has a Jennifer Aniston cell ”, you can read about research carried out by Rodrigo Quiroga from the University of Leicester. Quiroga and his team approached eight patients who were being treated for severe epilepsy. In an attempt to localise the areas of the brain responsible for the patients’ seizures, each patient had around 100 small electrodes implanted in their brain. Many of the electrodes were placed in the hippocampus – an area of the brain that acts as a kind of index of our long-term memory and is crucial for long-term memory formation. Now it is not so often that researchers are allowed to operate electrodes into people’s heads for no reason, and therefore these operations are occasionally used for research into brain function other than the main purpose, which in this case was to cure or alleviate the patients’ epilepsy. This is done, of course, with the patients’ full consent.

In their 'side project', the researchers first showed each patient between 71 and 114 pictures of famous people, places and foods. For each individual, the researchers measured the electrical activity, or firing, of the nerve cells connected to the electrodes. Of the 993 nerve cells measured, 132 fired to at least one picture.

The 132 nerve cells were now examined in more detail. This was done by showing the researchers three to seven different images of the subjects that created a response. For example, a woman saw seven different images of Jennifer Aniston along with 80 other images of animals, buildings or other famous people such as Julia Roberts. The nerve cell ignored almost all other images, but fired steadily every time Aniston appeared on the screen. The nerve cell also fired in response to an image of Jennifer Aniston's former Friends colleague, Lisa Kudrow, who plays Phoebe in the series. This suggests that Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow are linked together in this particular woman's memory.

The team found similar results in another woman who had a neuron for images of Halle Berry. The neuron responded to a drawing of her face and to a picture with her name. “This neuron responds to the concept, the abstract entity, of Halle Berry,” Quiroga says. “We also showed images of Halle Berry as Catwoman, and you can barely see her because of the mask. But if you know it’s Halle Berry, the neuron still fires.”

Since the researchers could not examine all the nerve cells in the entire brain, one cannot say that the experiment proved that the concept 'Jennifer Aniston' only exists in the one nerve cell that responded. The experiment does not take into account that the nerve cell is connected to other nerve cells that were simply not measured - and that it may be that the activity of several nerve cells together represents Jennifer Aniston in the brain in question.

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