Oct 29 2008
A leading neuroscientist and bio-engineer, whose research was recently cited among the top papers in the world, is to reveal details of his studies into what has been dubbed the ‘Jennifer Aniston neuron’ during a public presentation at the University of Leicester.
Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga discovered that a remarkable type of neuron in the brain fired in an ‘abstract’ manner to completely different pictures of familiar persons, for example Jennifer Aniston or Halle Berry.
He further discovered that given the firing of these neurons, it was possible to actually tell what the subjects were seeing far above chance – they were literally reading the mind.
Professor Quian Quiroga said: “One of the major scientific challenges of our days is to understand how information is represented by neurons in the brain. Although there has been spectacular progress in the last few decades, we are still far from comprehending, for example, how visual inputs are processed to create a conscious perception. Our main research interest is to study these principles of Neural Coding. Moreover, since complex behaviour is encoded by the activity of large populations of neurons, we are working on the development of advanced methods to extract useful information from these data.”
Professor Quian Quiroga, of the Department of Engineering, will deliver his inaugural Professorial lecture on Tuesday 4 November. The lecture, The Jennifer Aniston neuron: How the brain perceives the world and forms new memories, is free and open to the public. It takes place in Lecture Theatre 1, Ken Edwards Building starting at 5.30pm.
Professor Quian Quiroga said: “I am examining how information about the external world (what we see, hear, touch) and our own internal representations (e.g. memories, emotions, etc.) is represented by neurons in the brain.
“For example, we can easily recognize a person in a fraction of a second, even when seen from different angles, with different sizes, colours, contrasts and under strikingly different conditions. But how neurons in the brain are capable of creating such an ‘abstract’ representation, disregarding basic visual details, is only starting to be known.”
Professor Quian Quiroga will describe how his research has high clinical potential for the development of NeuroProsthetic devices, such as robotic arms driven by neural signals to be used by paralyzed patients.
Professor Quian Quiroga’s discovery has far-reaching implications not only for the development of neuronal prostheses, but for treatment of patients with pathologies involving the hippocampal formation, such as epilepsy, Alzheimers and schizophrenia and for further understanding of how perceptions and memories are represented in the brain