I am very happy to share with you this illustration that I did for Dr. Hernan Rey from the Neurosurgery Laboratory of the Medical College of Wisconsin, and that just before the final of this World Cup, today it is already uploaded to his website (https:/ /www.mcw.edu/.../neurosurgery/research/rey-laboratory). Dr. Rey was a student of Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, who reported back in 2005 a fascinating discovery to understand how our brain works: did you know that there is a neuron that is always activated when we see an image of Messi? The same neuron is only activated by a photo of Messi and not of other soccer players. And in this sense, it will also be possible to find a neuron that activates only before an image of Maradona (it is worth clarifying that when saying "a neuron" it must be understood that in reality they are small and determined groups in the space of neurons in the hippocampus ). One can then imagine a network of neurons that are activated by the Messi concept, in which there will be subgroups of neurons that are activated by the Messi 1 image, another subgroup of neurons that are activated by the Messi 2 image, and so on. in number of images. There will also be a subgroup of neurons that will be activated by the written concept, that is, the letters of the word Messi. And this, although it may sound very intuitive, finding that a single neuron is linked to a particular concept was a great step in the area of ​​neuroscience to understand how our mind works. This group of scientists also found that this "Messi neuron" has great potential to carry out associations: for example, if we were shown photos of Messi with Maradona, the same neuron that only activated with the image of Messi would It's going to take a very short time to start activating with photos only of Maradona. That is, our neruona will change its activation capabilities to encode a new memory 🤯 (DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.035).
I hope you like it 😀
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