Grandmother Cell

CORE DEFINITION

The grandmother cell is a hypothesis proposed by neurobiologist Jerome Lettvin, suggesting that there exists a single neuron or a group of neurons in the human brain that activates when specific concepts, such as an image of your grandmother, appear. The concept is not limited to people. To this day, the neuroscience community has not reached a consensus on how the human brain memorizes and recalls individual concepts. There are mainly two viewpoints on this issue. One viewpoint holds that the hundreds of billions of neurons in the brain work together to encode individual concepts, in which case it is impossible to encode a single concept into certain neurons, and it must rely on the cooperation of the entire neuronal population. The other viewpoint holds that a specific neuron or neurons in the brain are responsible for encoding individual concepts. In the 1960s, American neurologist Jerome Lettvin named the latter the grandmother cell theory, meaning that the brain has neurons specifically responsible for recognizing family members; when you lose the neurons responsible for encoding your grandmother, you may no longer recognize her.