Certain brain cells, called “concept cells,” in the hippocampus track pronouns to link them with the right person in a sentence. They respond not only to a person’s name or image but also to pronouns like “he” or “she” that refer to them.

>Languages use pronouns to refer to nouns or concepts that were introduced earlier in a conversation. Do these pronouns activate the same neuronal representations in the brain as the previously introduced words? Using human intracranial recordings, Dijksterhuis et al. found that during reading, single cells in the medial temporal lobes that respond selectively to specific individuals also respond to pronouns that later in sentences refer to previously read nouns. These results indicate how memory and language are linked at the single-cell level. —Peter Stern

Paper: [Pronouns reactivate conceptual representations in human hippocampal neurons | Science](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr2813)

And one Billion other conceptual things besides pronouns

[removed]

I was just reading about how they think they hold specific memories too. I never even heard bout them before

This inspired me to look up some information about the “Jennifer Aniston” cell [https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050620/full/news050620-7.html](https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050620/full/news050620-7.html) and what I found interesting was that this was originally thought to be part of visual recognition, but in this study, when they found a neuron that was specific to an image (in this case it was a “Shrek” cell) it fired when the subject saw a picture of Shrek and when they read the word *Shrek* (in addition to when they read the pronoun *he* in a sentence that referred to Shrek.)

Clearly this is not about pattern recognition – that process must have already happened. This seems to be more of a symbolic representation of a concept (if Shrek can be called a concept.) If the subject heard a recording of Shrek talking, would this cell fire? My guess is yes.

Republicans: “These woke brain cells”