Scientists have long searched in vain for a class of brain cells that could explain the visceral flash of recognition that we feel when we see a very familiar face, like that of our grandmothers. But the proposed “grandmother neuron” — a single cell at the crossroads of sensory perception and memory, capable of prioritizing an important face over the rabble — remained elusive.
Now, newresearch reveals a class of neurons in the brain’s temporal pole region that links face perception to long-term memory. It’s not quite the apocryphal grandmother neuron — rather than a single cell, it’s a population of cells that collectively remembers grandma’s face. The findings, published in Science, are the first to explain how our brains inculcate the faces of those we hold dear.
“When I was coming up in neuroscience, if you wanted to ridicule someone’s argument you would dismiss it as ‘just…
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