Morphed Images Of Hollywood Celebrities Reveal How Neurons Make Up Your Mind

September 29, 2014

Image Caption: Angelina Jolie + Halle Berry were morphed for the study. Credit: University of Leicester

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, University of Leicester

Study reveals individual neurons in the human brain are triggered by the subjects conscious perception, rather than by the visual stimulus

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, has shown how individual neurons in the human brain react to ambiguous morphed faces.

For this, the researchers used images of celebrities, such as Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry, morphed together to create an ambiguous face which test subjects were asked to identify.

The study found that for the same ambiguous images, the neurons fired according to the subjective perception by the subjects rather than the visual stimulus. For example, a neuron originally firing to Whoopi Goldberg fired to a morph image between Goldberg and Bob Marley only when the subject identified the morphed image as Goldberg and remained silent when the subject said the very same image was Marley.

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

The study was carried out by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga at Leicester, Alexander Kraskov from University College London, Christof Koch at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Florian Mormann at the University of Bonn and Itzhak Fried at the University of California Los Angeles. Their new paper, Single-Cell Responses to Face Adaptation in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe, has now been published in Neuron.

Professor Quiroga said: We are constantly bombarded with noisy and ambiguous sensory information and our brain is constantly making decisions based on such limited data.

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Morphed Images Of Hollywood Celebrities Reveal How Neurons Make Up Your Mind