One neurone in your brain may recognise this celebrity

The February edition of National Geographic has an excellent article on how new technologies are revealing more about the structure of the brain, including a technique for making brains transparent which neuroscientists have described as ‘pretty badass’.

Another study, at UCLA, used electrodes implanted directly into brain tissue  to study how the brain processes what people see. The research discovered a ‘Jennifer Aniston neurone’ – an individual nerve cell that fired each time the subject saw a photo of Jennifer Aniston (this was in 2005). This research suggested that the brain was incredibly efficient at storing information about faces.

The National Geographic channel has a sequence of ‘brain games’, to accompany a TV series on the brain, which are fun to do as well as prompting some thought-provoking questions about how we see the world.