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>the notion of Jennifer Aniston cells

I thought this was a joke that was slipped in, but it turns out this is actually a real thing[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell




> However, in that year UCLA neurosurgeons Itzhak Fried, mentee Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and others published findings on what they would come to call the "Jennifer Aniston neuron".[5][6] After operating on patients who experience epileptic seizures, the researchers showed photos of celebrities like Jennifer Aniston. The patients, who were fully conscious, often had a particular neuron fire, suggesting that the brain has Aniston-specific neurons.[6][7]

This is fascinating. How many celebrity neurons does my brain contain? What is the limit? I used to read Perez Hilton, what happened to the neurons for C list celebrities I forgot? Were they repurposed or is a Hilary Duff neuron just waiting there all my life until needed?


I was already desensitized by the Sonic Hedgehog protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein


Every so often I see an article or paper so far out of my field/familiarity that I'm not sure if I'm being pranked (i.e. The Retro Encabulator).

This would be one of those papers. They could tell me they discovered synchronized Cardinal Grammeters in neurons and I would have no idea if they were joking.


The concept of a Jennifer Aniston neuron was originally introduced as a joke, a rhetorical foil for other theories.


A well known hypothetical cat was born out of a similar attempt at reductio ad absurdum.


Always a great signal people have no idea what they are talking about when one starts 'explaining' quantum weirdness using it.


Agreed, but it's in a paper in Science, not a random blog post.




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