Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Brain & Facial Encoding, 2

In a paper published June 1, 2017 in the journal Cell, researchers Le Chang and Doris Y. Tsao reported that they have deciphered how faces are encoded in the brain—at least in primates. Previously, some experts in the field believed that each face cell (a.k.a. “grandmother cell“) in the brain represents a specific face. This presented a paradox, according to Doris Y. Tsao, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “You could potentially recognize 6 billion people, but you don’t have 6 billion face cells in the IT or inferior temporal cortex. There had to be some other solution.” It turns out there was. More tomorrow.

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