Celebrities IN Your Brain Edit
The Jennifer Aniston Neuron

Believe it or not, our brains have a Jennifer Aniston neuron that is dedicated to reacting to the famous Friends sitcom star according to a new study by a leading neuroscientist and bio-engineer whose research is cited among the top papers in the world. So don’t feel bad for being obsessed with celebrities anymore.

Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga discovered that the Jennifer Aniston neuron fired in an ‘abstract’ manner to completely different pictures of familiar persons, such as Jennifer Aniston, Britney Spears or Halle Berry.

Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga recently gave a lecture, The Jennifer Aniston neuron: How the brain perceives the world and forms new memories, on Tuesday 4 November 2008.

Professor Quian Quiroga said: “One of the major scientific challenges of our days is to understand how information is represented by neurons in the brain. Although there has been spectacular progress in the last few decades, we are still far from comprehending, for example, how visual inputs are processed to create a conscious perception. Our main research interest is to study these principles of Neural Coding. Moreover, since complex behaviour is encoded by the activity of large populations of neurons, we are working on the development of advanced methods to extract useful information from these data.”

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