Oprah Winfrey holds the key to your brain
Oprah Winfrey and Luke Skywalker could help boffins understand how our brains work, it has been claimed.Researchers say they have found a part of our brains which responds to distinct images and sounds of a person, by creating a concept of them in our minds.
They did this by showing people various images of famous people including Oprah, Luke Skywalker and Marilyn Monroe while monitoring brain activity.
It was found that whether someone saw a picture of Oprah, read her name, or even heard her talk, the same neutrons in the brian lit up, meaning specific brain cells could be used for remembering for specific individuals.
Neuroscientists at the University of Leicester have even dubbed a part of the brain the "Oprah neurons" ... what's wrong, wasn't the TV show, books and magazine enough for her.
Professor Quian Quiroga said: “Different pictures can evoke the same mental image. This process relates to one of the most fascinating questions in neuroscience: how do neurons in the brain manage to abstract and disregard irrelevant details to recognize highly variable pictures as the same person?
"The processing of visual and auditory information follows completely different cortical pathways in the brain, but we are showing that this information converges into single neurons in the hippocampus, at the very end of these pathways for processing sensory information.
"This work gives us further understandings of how information is processed in the brain, by creating a high level of abstraction which is important for perception and memory formation given that we tend to remember abstract concepts and forget irrelevant details."
LINKS
University of Leicester
"The processing of visual and auditory information follows completely different cortical pathways in the brain, but we are showing that this information converges into single neurons in the hippocampus, at the very end of these pathways for processing sensory information.
"This work gives us further understandings of how information is processed in the brain, by creating a high level of abstraction which is important for perception and memory formation given that we tend to remember abstract concepts and forget irrelevant details."
LINKS
University of Leicester
