Collins Conference Room
Seminar
US Mountain Time
Our campus is closed to the public for this event.
Charles Stevens (The Salk Institute; KIMB, UCSD; SFI External Professor)
Abstract. Jennifer Aniston cells are neurons in medial temporal lobe of some people that are found to respond specifically to any image of Jennifer Aniston’s face. Neurons with this property are often called ‘grandmother cells’. To learn how such neurons can arise, I explain a very simple example of this phenomenon: how neurons in the fly brain can learn to respond specifically to any odor (to approach or avoid that odor), even an odor no fly has ever experienced before. In both cases, the brain is learning to respond exclusively to a stimulus that can be represented by an arbitrary point in a high-dimensional space: a face (104 dimensions) or an odor (50 dimensions).