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Comment by Throwaway12830 | Hacker News Reader

It really is incredible. I mean, in the original link, look at the image of Arnold used for the video before playing. It's a blurry, greyscale section of his face. Nonetheless, most people could easily recognize that face as being him.

Billions of people in this world, we all have a very similar facial structure with two eyes, a nose and a mouth, and yet you can recognize that small blurry face in a fraction of a second.

I imagine it's similar with animals. You can have thousands of birds in a flock, and they can recognize their mate instantly. To us, we'd have to carefully analyze the birds for days or weeks to make that same match.

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What amazing is that scientists discovered that brain allocates one single neuron fires for each recognized face. For example, You have a one special neuron in your brain that fires when you see Bill Clinton's face. And that exact neuron fires no matter what picture of Bill Clinton you happened to see.

> What amazing is that scientists discovered that brain allocates one single neuron fires for each recognized face.

This is nonsense, citation needed.

> For example, You have a one special neuron in your brain that fires when you see Bill Clinton's face.

This is New Age science, i.e. not science at all. It's a myth. One neuron is equivalent to one bit in a computer. One bit of information is insufficient to distinguish between faces.

> And that exact neuron fires no matter what picture of Bill Clinton you happened to see.

Maybe you could learn a tiny bit of neuroscience before spreading this kind of nonsense.

The link is posted above. It is not nonsense. The research was done at Caltech by neuroscientist Christof Koch , one of the top neuroscientists in the world.

http://www.klab.caltech.edu/koch/

Sorry my post evoked such a harsh response from you.

> One neuron is equivalent to one bit in a computer. One bit of information is insufficient to distinguish between faces.

"Seen <particular face>" is a binary state, so one output neuron that fires on recognizing a particular face is actually quite reasonable.

Obviously, the inputs that contribute to that recognition must be more complicated.

You need to learn some neuroscience buddy. One neuron is not one bit. A neuron works in much complex way than a single bit in a computer. A neuron has hundreds to thousands axons and dendrites and connect with other neurons in a dense network. I am surprised by your knowledge of neuroscience yet attacking me. very strange.

EDIT: As dragonwriter says below, lower levels of neural networks are responsible for general facial recognition but that triggers more specific neurons once the recognition is done from generic face -> specific person. Even in artificial neural networks single bit is sufficient at the end of the classification.

In that case, your original claim was false -- either one neuron is acting alone as you claimed, or it isn't. Your claim was that one neuron was acting alone, which is absurd.

A neuron is interconnected to many others, but this doesn't mean one neuron is many neurons, any more than one binary bit is 64 binary bits by virtue of its position in a binary word.

Citations please.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell#Individual_spe...

I am not sure why the link was down voted. But here is the excerpt from the wiki page:

In 2005, a UCLA and Caltech study found evidence of different cells that fire in response to particular people, such as Bill Clinton or Jennifer Aniston. A neuron for Halle Berry, for example, might respond "to the concept, the abstract entity, of Halle Berry", and would fire not only for images of Halle Berry, but also to the actual name "Halle Berry".

EDIT: Here is another link:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7567-why-your-brain-ha...

And here is the next sentence:

> However, there is no suggestion in that study that only the cell being monitored responded to that concept, nor was it suggested that no other actress would cause that cell to respond (although several other presented images of actresses did not cause it to respond). The researchers believe that they have found evidence for sparseness, rather than for grandmother cells.

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