118 GENOME EDITING
Neurons play a key role in the formation of memory
Neuroscientists use morphed images of Hollywood celebrities to reveal how neurons make up your mind.
A
n international team of scientists, involving Professor Rodrigo
Quian Quiroga, director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and Head of Bioengineering at the UK’s University of Leicester, has shown how individual neurons in the human brain react to ambiguous morphed faces.
For this, the researchers used images of celebrities, such as Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry, morphed together to create
an ambiguous face which test subjects were asked to identify.
Te study found that for the same ambiguous images, the neurons fired according to the subjective perception by the subjects rather than the visual stimulus.
For example, a neuron originally firing to Whoopi Goldberg fired to a morph image between Goldberg and Bob Marley only when the subject identified the morphed image as Goldberg and remained silent when the subject said the very same image was Marley.
Tey concluded that neurons fire in line with conscious recognition of images rather
than the actual images seen. Furthermore, in most cases the neuron’s responses to morphed pictures were the same as when shown the pictures without morphing.
Te study was carried out by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga at Leicester, Alexander Kraskov from University College London, Christof Koch at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Florian Mormann at the University of Bonn and Itzhak Fried at the University of California Los Angeles.
Professor Quiroga said: “We are constantly bombarded with noisy and ambiguous sensory information and our brain is constantly making decisions based on such limited data.”
“We indeed see the face of a friend rather than the combination of visual features that compose the person’s face. Te neurons we report in this article fire exactly to this, to the subjective perception by the subjects, not to the features of the faces they were seeing.
Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone
“In a sense, the interpretation of this result goes way back to British Empiricism and even to Aristotle. As Aristotle put it, we create images of the external world and use these images rather than the sensory stimulus itself for our thoughts. Tese neurons encode exactly that. Tis result supports the view that these neurons are play a key role in the formation of memory.”
Uma Thurman and Nicole Kidman.
Facial soft tissue landmarks using in asymmetry analysis.
www.scientistlive.com
Meanwhile, picking potential sexual partners because they have ‘attractive’ facial symmetry does not guarantee they will also be healthy, research has found.
Studies into the psychology of choosing a mate have often made the assumption that people have a preference for symmetry in faces because it provides a cue to good health.
However, a new study led by Dr Nicholas Pound from the Department of Life Sciences at Brunel University, London, calls this into question.
Te team found that a type of facial asymmetry in adolescents (known as fluctuating asymmetry) was not associated with early experiences of common childhood illnesses such as coughs, diarrhoea or vomiting; specific infections such as measles, chicken pox, or influenza; or physical indicators of health such as birth weight or later height.
Dr Pound said: “Overall, this study does not support the idea that subtle variations in facial symmetry act as a reliable cue to physiological health in the general population. However, it remains the case that significant trauma, serious infections and certain genetic conditions can cause substantial facial asymmetries – and people’s preferences for the absence of subtle asymmetries could reflect an overgeneralisation from an aversion to major asymmetries.”
Te study, carried out with Cardiff University, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the University of Bristol used data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) to test a sample of more than 4,700 children using 3D face scans and health records collected over more than a decade.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120