Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

So it turns out that if you are familiar with people like Donald Trump, our president, for better or worse, we all have neurons that's a claim ultimately, that there are neurons in the brain that respond relatively specifically when I tell you Donald Trump, when I

Just mention him.

Or when you dream of Trump or imagine him or see him on a podcast, there will be specific cells.

Because it makes sense.

Because these people, like your family, your friends, the people you work with, they're so important.

Your brain has decided to wire up neurons that respond to these specific images.

And, of course, we find something like that in deep neural networks.

It's been difficult to find these in other animals, partly because animals don't have this repertoire of knowing thousands or tens of thousands of different people.

You and I can recognize probably instantaneously 10,000 different people.

It's something unique to the human species.

Yeah, so it's now sort of part of textbook knowledge, including the name Jennifer Aniston.

What's really funny...

I had a postdoc, Liat Mudrik.

She's now a professor at Tel Aviv.

Part-time, she interviewed people to make some living.

She interviewed people for a living, and she talked to Jennifer Aniston about this.

She had no idea, Jennifer Aniston, that these neurons were there.

It was a very interesting conversation.

So interesting.

People had difficulty believing that because it was generally a phenomenon