Do You Have Brain Cells Devoted to Oprah?

Celebrity magazines are all about the money shots -- tantalizing, high resolution, unmistakable images of the people popular culture knows well.

"You have to get what's going on just by looking at [a photo], so you don't even need to read the headline," said Peter Grossman, news photo editor at Us Weekly magazine. "You don't want an image on a cover that people stop and think, 'Who is that?'"

But people are better at recognizing familiar faces -- and words and ideas -- even when they are presented in different and potentially unfamiliar ways.

In a study published today in the journal Current Biology, researchers used pictures and written and spoken words to show that the brain consolidates multiple kinds of information into one concept that activates specific signal cells in the brain, known as neurons.

Related

Can Real Men Admit They're Depressed?

Men Can't Hear: Sex-Linked Sensory Differences

Is the Y Chromosome Going Bye-Bye?

"What matters for the human is the concept, not how you trigger the concept," said Roderigo Quian Quiroga, professor of bioengineering at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and lead author of the study. "With any picture of Oprah Winfrey the neuron fires. If I say the name, the neuron will fire."

Quiroga found that reading Oprah's name also caused the same neurons to fire.

"Intuitively, it is very easy for us to link all this information into the same concept but so far, we didn't know how the brain does that," he said.

Brain Cells Fire From Multiple Sensory Inputs

Quiroga and his team used brain imaging to track which parts of the brain lit up when people saw, heard, or read about a famous person. While visual and auditory cues are processed by separate pathways in the brain, these cues were ultimately recognized by the same neurons in the hippocampus, the area of the brain associated with memory.

"Recognition has to do with stored memories and storied memories have to do with what kind of value is attached to them and what kind of context it is in," said Dr. Ausim Azizi, chairman of the department of neurology at the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, who was not affiliated with the research.

"The reasoning behind why some memories stick and others come and go is which has the most emotional content, positive or negative," he said.