When an artificial intelligence sees a picture of the comic book hero Spider-Man, it can conjure the thought of a spider – an advanced connection that humans make and that now appears to be happening in neural networks made to mimic our brains.
In the 1960s, neuroscientist Jerry Lettvin proposed that human brains had “grandmother cells” that correspond to memories of specific people or objects. The idea was labelled simplistic at the time, but experiments since that time using brain implants have shown not …