Gary Marcus

oprah neurons are not real

Quite. In fact, the data explicitly disproves any kind of grandmother cells. Consider for a moment the “Jennifer Anniston cells” that were reported in the media several years ago:

The researchers were recording from a *very* small subset of all neurons in the temporal lobes, and presenting ppl with a *very, very* small set of stimuli from the set of all possible stimuli. Yet, they found cells that responded to their stimuli. What does that tell us?

We’ll, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga explained it very clearly. The Jennifer Aniston cell was actually a “Rachel in Friends” cell that also fire, at lower rate, for Monica and Phoebe.

Exactly what you would expect in neural network with winner-take-all localist output units...

No, I disagree. Given the sampling issues I discussed (small % of stimuli and cells) it’s actually a guarantee of a distributed code.

but how would the data look different? given the sampling that we can currently do, there is no pattern of data that you would accept

If we it was hard to find neurons in higher-order areas that responded to stimuli, and when they did they only responded to one (note: cells in these studies usually responded to multiple stimuli), that would at least not falsify a localist account. The current data does.