The Jennifer Aniston neuron
Discovered in 2005 by Argentine neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, from the University of Leicester (United Kingdom), the Jennifer Aniston neuron is a nerve cell located in the hippocampus, the brain area responsible for memory and memory formation.
The researcher found it while studying the reaction of epileptic patients when looking at photographs of familiar people and places. Specifically, 14 people with severe epilepsy participated in the study. They had electrodes implanted to identify the location in the brain where their seizures arose. The devices also allowed the researchers to identify individual neurons that encoded memories.
Subjects were shown around 100 images of celebrities, including Jennifer Aniston, James Brolin, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Clint Eastwood, Julia Roberts, and famous landmarks such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Eiffel Tower, and the White House.
To his surprise, he found that a neuron was activated intensely (with between 20 and 30 “shots” or impulses per second) when he showed the volunteers the portrait of the American actress Jennifer Aniston but did not respond to any other stimulus.
This implied that brain cells can be linked to a specific concept and that, possibly, each person that we see regularly — our partner, friends, relatives, celebrities … — has a corresponding super-specialized neuron. In other words, we probably also have one for Grandma, another for Luke Skywalker, and another that only answers to tennis player Rafael Nadal, for example. The experiment also worked with places, like the tower of Pisa or the Eiffel tower.
This finding suggests that the gray mass not only stores our memories in a network, but that some of its individual cells are directly associated with one or, at most, two items. By observing their behavior, you could even guess what someone is thinking, and even protect them on a screen, as Quian Quiroga himself has proposed.
“This study goes to the heart of the neural code that underlies one of the most fundamental aspects of human cognition and memory, namely the formation of associations,”
Says neurosurgeon Dr. Itzhak Fried of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“The surprising finding was that this basic code is so explicit at the level of individual neurons in the human brain,” adds Fried, noting that the researchers were able to record the activity of “a single cell in a multitude of billions of neurons in the brain.”
Neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, from the British University Leicester Center for Systems Neuroscience, says the findings could be important in helping people with neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s.
“To understand and treat such pathologies, it is always helpful to understand how the brain’s natural process of forming and encoding new memories works and then trying to understand what can go wrong with the pathology and how to potentially treat it,” Quiroga said.
Not all of us have Jennifer Aniston neurons, nor is there a neuron whose sole job is to recognize Jennifer Aniston. (Quiroga says that there are probably many neurons that fire in response to the actress and that this neuron probably also responded to other concepts that she did not test.)
But the discovery of a neuron that is linked to a particular concept is a very important milestone in understanding how the mind works.
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