Today's Word: Appeal

You wanted the last chance, she whispered in my ear. How much would you give for a little more? How much would you sacrifice to spare your own life? Threaten a man with his life, and you'll see what life he wants to protect.

Celebrity Neural Colonialism, or Audrey Tautou owns my brain

This is a bit weird.

When scientists sampled brain cell activity in people who were scrutinizing dozens of pictures, they found some individual cells that reacted to a particular celebrity, landmark, animal or object.

In one case, a single cell was activated by different photos of Berry, including some in her "Catwoman" costume, a drawing of her and even the words, "Halle Berry."

The findings appear in a part of the brain that transforms what people perceive into what they'll eventually remember, said Dr. Itzhak Fried of the University of California, Los Angeles, a senior investigator on the project.

The findings do not mean that a particular person or object is recognized and remembered by only one brain cell, Fried said. "There is not only one cell that codes for Jennifer Aniston. That would be impossible," Fried said.

Nor do they mean that a given brain cell will react to only one person or object, he said, because the study participants were tested with only a relatively limited number of pictures. In fact, some cells were found to respond to more than one person, or to a person and an object.

What the study does suggest, Fried and colleagues say in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, is that the brain appears to use relatively few cells to record something it sees. That's in contrast to the idea that it uses a huge network of brain cells instead.

Further down...

The researchers tested eight people with epilepsy who'd had electrodes placed in their brains so that doctors could track down the origins of their seizures. The electrodes monitored the activity of a small fraction of cells in a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe.

The researchers kept track of which cells became activated as the participants looked at images of people, landmarks and objects on a laptop computer. One participant had a brain cell that reacted to different pictures of Aniston, for example, but was not strongly stimulated by other famous or non-famous faces.

Heck, I could have told you that the brain's gonna remember Halle Berry in her Catwoman outfit. I mean, sheesh.