Neurons And The Human Brain: How We 'Make Up Our Mind'

First Posted: Sep 26, 2014 02:31 PM EDT
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Morphed images may essentially determine how our brains make up our minds about what we actually see, according to recent findings published in the journal Neuron.

An international team of scientists, involving Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester presented images of celebrities morphed together, including the following combinations: Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone and Uma Thurman and Nicole Kidman. Based on the pictures, created ambiguous faces for test subjects to properly identify.

Findings revealed that neurons fired according to subjective perception of the subjects rather than the visual stimulus. For example, a neuron that originally fired to Whoopi Goldberg may now have fired to a morph between her and another celebrity only when the subject identified the morphed image as Goldberg yet remained silent about the other morphed celebrity.

Thus, researchers concluded that neurons fire in line with conscious recognition of images rather than the actual images seen. Furthermore, in most cases the neuron's responses to morphed pictures were the same as when shown the pictures without morphing.

"We are constantly bombarded with noisy and ambiguous sensory information and our brain is constantly making decisions based on such limited data," Quiroga added, in a news release. "We indeed see the face of a friend rather than the combination of visual features that compose the person's face. The neurons we report in this article fire exactly to this, to the subjective perception by the subjects, not to the features of the faces they were seeing."

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