trained monkeys to move a joystick in one of multiple directions towards a lit LED.

Neurons in the primary motor cortex responded maximally during movements to their preferred direction, i.e. the direction neurons are trained to respond towards the lit LED, and the neuron response decreased if the animal made movements towards directions increasingly different from the preferred direction (Dayan and Abbott, 2001). Neuroscientists found that, indeed, some neurons provide better information than others, and a population of such expert neurons has an improved signal to noise ratio or information quality. This means populations of neurons do better than single neurons. How the specific populations of neurons are assembled is thought to provide the functional elements of brain activity that execute the basic operations of information processing (Fingerlkurts et al., 2004; Fingerlkurts et al., 2005). The number of neurons in a population is claimed not to be big. Some neuroscientists believe it to be not more than 100 neurons. Others believe it can be greater than 100 neurons. But the key issues is that chunks of information are encoded and stored in small populations of neurons. Here, a small population of neurons, i.e. hundreds of neurons, is considered small relative to the billions of neurons in the brain. However, those who believe the Grandmother Cell Theory would say one neuron is sufficient to represent an object at the top of the highest hierarchy chain of neuron encoding. The Grandmother Cell theory , coined by neurobiologist Jerome Levtite in the 1950s, hypothesizes that a single neuron is sufficient to store an object or a concept (including one grandmother s face). The latest support on this idea come from the study by a group of scientists from UCLA, CalTech, and MIT; see article (Quiroga et al., 2005). Their results suggest an invariant, sparse, and explicit code, which might be important in the transformation of complex visual percepts into long-term and more abstract memories.