Neuroscientists record novel responses to faces from single neurons in humans
Responding to faces is a critical tool for social interactions between humans. Without the ability to read faces and their expressions, it would be hard to tell friends from strangers upon first glance, let alone a sad person from a happy one. Now, neuroscientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), with the help of collaborators at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, have discovered a novel response to human faces by looking at recordings from brain cells in neurosurgical patients.
The finding, described in the journal Current Biology, provides the first description of neurons that respond strongly when the patient sees an entire face, but respond much less to a face in which only a very small region has been erased.
“The finding really surprised us,” says Ueli Rutishauser, first author on the paper, a former postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, and now a visitor in the Division of Biology. “Here you have neurons that respond well to seeing pictures of whole faces, but when you show them only parts of faces, they actually respond less and less the more of the face you show. That just seems counterintuitive.”
From theories of the holographic brain, to a Hegelian deeper knowing before the “I” recognizes it knows, this raises so many wonderful questions.