Evidence for ‘grandmother cells’

This week’s edition of the science journal Nature reports that single brain cells may be specialised for recognising specific faces.
This is an interesting finding, as it provides support for a derided hypothesis known as the ‘grandmother cell‘ theory, that was thought up to ridicule attempts to reduce human experience down to smaller and smaller components of the brain.
Neuroscience often develops by trying to understanding how smaller parts of the brain support larger processes. Bologist Jerry Lettvin argued that we can’t expect everything to reduce down to the smallest level, as some things will be distributed across the brain.
It is unlikely, he argued, that there is a single brain cell to represent each person we know, a neuron that is active when we see our grandmother, for example.
This has since been used as an argument against any theory that is seen as over-simplifying how things are represented in the brain.
But now, a team led by neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga has identified neurons which do seem to be active for individual faces.
He implanted harmless electrodes into the temporal lobes of volunteers undergoing surgery for epilepsy.
Quiroga then showed the participants pictures of famous faces, and discovered some cells were only active for individual faces in the set – Halle Berry, or even members of The Simpsons.
Of course, it’s impossible to say whether these cells are truly selective for an individual face out of all the ones a person may know, but this level of selectivity is a great surprise for those who thought individual cells would be active for very general features of the visual world.
Link to write-up from nature.com
Link to study abstract.

Dead space 2

As a shooter/action it was pretty average but as to plot - it's probably the greatest plot I've ever seen in sci-fi games. Even though with no cutscenes things were entertaining and rather original.
Also, the first one reminded me of "Solaris" where character was in same situation: he met his dead girlfriend on a space station due to alien interventions although other details were a bit different.
Dead spcace 2 has performed much more smooth engine and gameplay. The plot was also much more comprehensive.

first steps of frontal lobotomy

   Neurosurgical Focus has an excellent open-access article that takes a critical look at the work of the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz – who controversially won the 1949 Nobel prize for inventing the frontal lobotomy.
Although the over-enthusiasm for cutting patients’ frontal lobes to try and ‘cure’ them of mental illness is now looked upon as rather an embarrassing phase in the history of medicine, the article makes clear that criticism of the technique – including Moniz’s sloppy research – has been around for as long as the operation itself.
The article is a comprehensive look at the early history of frontal lobotomy and psychosurgery in general and is a wonderful guide to the long-standing controversies surrounding the procedure.

first post

hello, here'll be my blog. I  will try to post here some information about my hobbies.