I think it's unfair to say no sensible neuroscientist believed it. Those papers were written by sensible neuroscientists, and they have been cited thousands of times, and very few of those citations are citing them to criticize them.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
I've cited it a few times, but I never believed it to be a "grandmother"-type cell: other cells must contribute to the representation of Jennifer Aniston and I bet the example neuron probably responds like crazy to something else out of the stim set too.
Yes but when I taught this I always pointed out that there would have been a population of cells with similar firing. Ages ago Georgopoulos told us how to think about these things. I did mean ‘sensible’.
But even if you ignore concept cells, there are tons of cases in the literature where people claim categoricality, or who assume categoricality in their theorizing.
This paper is in Nature because of its claims of categoricality.
This is a great example. But also raises a thorny issue. Experimental variables are used to define selectivity, and thus may not exhibit categories. But those variables maybe just be measurable emissions of latents the experimenter doesn’t know/define. its called “latent confounding”
Comments
It's just surprisingly sparse and invariant!
This paper is in Nature because of its claims of categoricality.
It's definitely not a straw man!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1816-9
But also - we can still test specific theories like abstract value and falsify those