Do “grandmother cells” exist?
May 21st, 2009 by June von BoninHow does the brain recognise faces or objects? The theory of the “grandmother cells” says that one neuron represents the person’s grandma. However, the brain needs a lot of these cells, if every recognizable part of our perception of life is coded by a grandmother cell.. A second idea, how brains recognise people and objects is to use a large network of neurons to recognize people and objects.
New research suggests a third method: Our brains use a “sparse-coding network”, in which small groups of neurons work together to recognize an object and in which each neuron may be able to join a few different groups.
(via discovermagazine.com)
