Am I seeing something that I don’t really see? Germany has a new study that finds a specific neuron in the brain fires up when a person sees a photograph of a familiar face, even if they aren’t aware of seeing it.
Tracy Staedter, a Live Science contributor, has attempted to clarify some things the brain can do. The brain can react to something that we aren’t consciously aware of that adds to the growing amount of knowledge of how the activities of certain brain cells relate to consciousness, according to lead study author Thomas Weber, a research fellow of epileptology at the University of Bonn Medical Center in Germany.
The new study published in the journal Current Biology believes, based on earlier studies, that individual brain cells are linked to awareness and recognition of a celebrity. The Jennifer Aniston neuron was a single neuron in a study participant’s brain that lit up when they recognized the face of a specific person such as Jennifer Aniston, Bill Clinton or Halle Berry.
Whenever a person’s conscious experience was concerned with a certain object or a person, a certain cell lit up in the medial temporal lobe. Weber and his team used a method to hide images from a participant’s awareness and built their experiment around a phenomenon called attentional blink. This occurs when a person is shown two target images in quick succession among a rapid stream of other images that are equally familiar. Thus, the person often fails to notice the second target image. This actually hides things in plain sight.
A study was conducted that enlisted 21 patients with epilepsy who were having electrodes placed in their brains for a special treatment unrelated to this experiment. These neurons were nicknamed “Roger Federer cells.” The participant would see 14 different images that scientists had previously determined were familiar to the person and having elected specific activity of a particular brain cell. The participant was instructed to look for two target images among the 14 and each of the images would flash on a screen for 150 milliseconds. Activity in the medial temporal lobe was monitored, during the trial and after, and participants were asked if they had seen the two images of the familiar faces. Each participated in 216 trials and slightly less than 1/2 reported they had not seen the second image.
They found rather when a person failed to see the image of a familiar face, the “Roger Federer cell” lit up, even though the signal was a bit weaker and fired a little later than for the non-hidden target image. This explains how some brain cells process information that may be too blunt. There are more in-betweens on the neural level than previously shown.
Researchers were able to link brain cell patterns to specific images and could tell which had been presented, even though the subjects themselves were unaware of it. The medial temporal lobe is an area not previously thought to play a role in awareness or perception.
They would like to investigate what would happen to perception and memory if there were direct stimulation of neurons.
Dr Fredda Branyon