[extropy-chat] Can a single brain cell recognize Bill Clinton?

[Neil Halelamien]

(digs up post to ai-philosophy)

For more technical details...

Nature paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7045/full/nature03687.html
PDF: http://www.klab.caltech.edu/refweb/paper/519.pdf (not sure if PDF
is downloadable from off-campus)

R. Quian Quiroga, L. Reddy, G. Kreiman, C. Koch & I. Fried. Invariant
visual representation by single neurons in the human brain. Nature
(2005) 435, 0-0

Abstract: It takes a fraction of a second to recognize a person or an
object even when seen under strikingly different conditions. How such
a robust, high-level representation is achieved by neurons in the
human brain is still unclear. In monkeys, neurons in the upper stages
of the ventral visual pathway respond to complex images such as faces
and objects and show some degree of invariance to metric properties
such as the stimulus size, position and viewing angle. We have
previously shown that neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL)
fire selectively to images of faces, animals, objects or scenes. Here
we report on a remarkable subset of MTL neurons that are selectively
activated by strikingly different pictures of given individuals,
landmarks or objects and in some cases even by letter strings with
their names. These results suggest an invariant, sparse and explicit
code, which might be important in the transformation of complex visual
percepts into long-term and more abstract memories.

On 6/30/05, Terry W. Colvin <fortean1 at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Forwarding permission was given by William R. Corliss
> 
> Can a single brain cell recognize Bill Clinton?