NEURONS can have a better memory for faces than the brain of which they
are a part. Californian researchers made this discovery by showing people with
epilepsy, whose brains were being monitored using implanted electrodes as a
prelude to surgery, two series of photographs of faces. The second series
included some faces from the first, along with others that had not been seen
before.
In the current issue of Neuron (vol 18, p 753), the researchers say
that even when a patient couldn’t recall seeing one of the photographs before,
some neurons responded to the face if it had been in the first series. “This
suggests that conscious recollection works like a democracy,” says Itzhak Fried
of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the research. “Even those
neurons that are always right sometimes get voted down.”
