[1] Rather than serving as a serious hypothesis, the "grandmother cell" concept was initially largely used in jokes and came to be used as a "straw man or foil" for a discussion of ensemble theories in introductory textbooks.
"[1] Around 1969, Lettvin introduced the term "grandmother cell" in a course he was teaching at MIT, telling a fictitious anecdote about a neurosurgeon who had discovered a group of "mother cells" in the brain that "responded uniquely only to a mother... whether animate or stuffed, seen from before or behind, upside down or on a diagonal or offered by caricature, photograph or abstraction".
[1] By 2005, Ed Connor observed that the term had "become a shorthand for invoking all of the overwhelming practical arguments against a one-to-one object coding scheme.
"[5] However, in that year UCLA neurosurgeons Itzhak Fried, mentee Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and others published findings on what they would come to call the "Jennifer Aniston neuron".
[1] Moreover, it has been suggested that these cells might in fact be responding as specialized feature detector neurons that only function in the holistic context of a face construct.
[1] In 2005, a UCLA and Caltech study found evidence of different cells that fire in response to particular people, such as Bill Clinton or Jennifer Aniston.
[20] Further evidence for the theory that a small neural network provides facial recognition was found from analysis of cell recording studies of macaque monkeys.