[HN Gopher] MIT scientists discover neurons that light up whenev...
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MIT scientists discover neurons that light up whenever we see
images of food
Author : rntn
Score : 61 points
Date : 2022-08-26 13:13 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| Someone wrote:
| So, how certain are we that these neurons and no others will also
| activate when we see food, rather than images of food? Or when we
| both see and smell food?
|
| I know it may seem like a small jump to make, but our
| understanding of the brain is fairly limited.
| csours wrote:
| Not being dismissive - did we not already know this? What about
| this finding was not already known?
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Actually the opposite. The story of a single neuron on/off
| state for everything we experience is just that, a story. If
| you tried to build a skull large enough to hold all that, it
| would burst. The reality is that paradigm of hardwired neurons
| works well for the initial layers of processing (Eg recognizing
| lines and circles in visual stimuli), but that same model can't
| be repeated all the way up to the point of having a
| "grandmother neuron" for recognizing Grandmas face. There's
| just too many possible states of grandmas. There has been some
| evidence (like this study) that maybe sometimes there are
| "sparsely coding neurons" (Eg, some monkeys apparently have a
| brain cell that reliably responds to seeing Jenifer Aniston and
| nothing else). But such sparse coding (if it exists) is the
| exception not the rule.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo
| amelius wrote:
| I think it was not known that it are always the same neurons
| lighting up, even between humans. So not learned behavior, but
| baked in through evolution.
|
| But I didn't read the article, so I could be wrong.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| In what sense can it be the "same" neuron across different
| people? And if the answer is that both light up under the
| same conditions, isn't that circular?
| amelius wrote:
| It can be the "same" neurons if they are found in the same
| area of the brain. E.g. in some layer behind the retina.
| tiahura wrote:
| "To do that, the researchers applied a mathematical method that
| allows them to discover neural populations that can't be
| identified from traditional fMRI data. An fMRI image is made up
| of many voxels -- three-dimensional units that represent a cube
| of brain tissue. Each voxel contains hundreds of thousands of
| neurons, and if some of those neurons belong to smaller
| populations that respond to one type of visual input, their
| responses may be drowned out by other populations within the
| same voxel.
|
| The new analytical method, which Kanwisher's lab has previously
| used on fMRI data from the auditory cortex, can tease out
| responses of neural populations within each voxel of fMRI data.
|
| Using this approach, the researchers found four populations
| that corresponded to previously identified clusters that
| respond to faces, places, bodies, and words. "That tells us
| that this method works, and it tells us that the things that we
| found before are not just obscure properties of that pathway,
| but major, dominant properties," Kanwisher says.
|
| Intriguingly, a fifth population also emerged, and this one
| appeared to be selective for images of food."
|
| -
|
| I think what the research is showing is that our visual cortex
| is primed to see 5 different categories: faces, places, bodies,
| words, and food.
| derbOac wrote:
| It's been awhile since I read through this literature, so I'm not
| an expert and things might have changed. However, with face
| neurons at least there was always an argument about the extent to
| which the neurons were specific to faces versus extremely
| motivationally significant stimuli that required individual
| recognition. I vaguely remember there being studies showing that
| if you showed people something that was very emotionally
| significant to them, and that they were expert in discriminating
| between exemplars (for example, many similar but different models
| of vintage cars to a vintage car enthusiast), similar neural
| populations would be recruited. The argument was that faces just
| happened to be something that tend to be really emotionally
| salient to most people, and that people have to differentiate
| between large numbers of exemplars of.
|
| Maybe that interpretation has been disproven now, or maybe it
| doesn't quite apply, but I wonder if it's really food or
| something else. Or if maybe at some level the neurons are
| responding to something so similar to "food" as a category the
| distinction is moot.
| johndhi wrote:
| This reminds me of something I read about babies (I have one).
| When they cry for hunger, is it that they are trying to say "I
| want food"? Probably not - it's more like, my stomach feels
| emptyish and that feels dangerous and I want something to come
| help me feel different.
| [deleted]
| ramoz wrote:
| Weird/random antidote - back in my late 20's I was going through
| fairly extreme dieting/working out (no carbs, calorie cutting,
| hours in gym, 6-pack abs yada yada) and everyday I would do a
| 45min incline walk (I did this for over a year straight) - the
| key to my success here was watching youtube videos of the people
| who binge eat all sorts of foods and try to have insane calorie
| days eating delicious take-out etc.
|
| I always looked forward to the 45min treadmil/food-video combo &
| it felt liked it helped combat any diet depression (regardless of
| how masochistit may've seemed).
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| So you basically discovered mukbang.
| simmerup wrote:
| Similarly, when I was doing 500 calorie a day cuts, watching
| people binge eat food kept me sane and satisfied any food
| cravings I had.
|
| Luckily, ever since eliminating sugar from my diet and doing
| monthly one day fasts I get no way as hungry as I used to
| thistime654 wrote:
| Ah yes, totally not circular. When I see me dog the neuron says
| no food. When I see a cow it says food-Oh wait, that's actually
| Bessy my pet cow, so it doesn't light up.
|
| There's no "Halle Berry neuron", it's just correlation. Not
| really groundbreaking that there's so-called neurons for "food"
| whatever that may be.
| chrsig wrote:
| do discoveries need to be ground breaking in order to be
| interesting?
| ysavir wrote:
| Are they really a "discovery" if they aren't? Seems more like
| a plain observation.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| The paper: https://www.cell.com/current-
| biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)...
|
| One of the highlights: a novel food-selective component is
| discovered in the ventral visual cortex
| classified wrote:
| The advertisement industry will eat this up.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| I read recently that even the smell of food kept fruit flies from
| getting life extending gains of calorie restricted diet:
|
| https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-07-serotonin-dopamine-mo...
| anon291 wrote:
| My wife says my face lights up when I see food. Good to know my
| neurons do too.
| xor99 wrote:
| Mmm.. picture of burger
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