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Consciousness

Be aware of your brother

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 9, page 247 (2008)Cite this article

Earlier experiments by the same research group showed that single MTL neurons fire sparsely and selectively in response to 1-second-long representations of a particular face, animal, object or scene, regardless of whether the representation is realistic (for example, a photo) or abstract (for example, a written word). This indicated that single MTL neurons might code for particular objects.

Here, the authors studied patients with epilepsy who had been implanted with electrodes as part of their evaluation for brain surgery aimed at controlling their seizures. The electrodes also enabled recording of single-neuron responses in the MTL to presentations of photos of familiar or famous people, animals and buildings. Each photo was shown multiple times and for different durations. Importantly, in contrast to previous studies, the photo presentations were so short (33 ms, 66 ms, 132 ms and 264 ms) that they were on the verge of conscious perception. In each trial the patients indicated whether they had perceived and recognized the image that had been presented. Using this information, the authors were able to correlate the response of individual MTL neurons to the conscious perception of particular stimuli.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Quian Quiroga, R. et al. Human single-neuron responses at the threshold of conscious recognition. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 3599–3604 (2008)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Quian Quiroga, R. et al. Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain. Nature 435, 1102–1107 (2005)

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  2. Kreiman, G. et al. Single-neuron correlates of subjective vision in the human medial temporal lobe. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 99, 8378–8383 (2002)

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

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Authors
  1. Leonie Welberg
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Welberg, L. Be aware of your brother. Nat Rev Neurosci 9, 247 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2366

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