Jennifer Aniston holds the key to how humans understand memories. Or at least pictures of her do. In a breakthrough in understanding brain function, a team of neuroscientists used pictures of celebrities like Aniston to figure out how neurons work when new learning takes place.

Previous studies have shown that specific neurons in the brain recognize names and images of specific people showing that they register people as concepts. This became known as the "Jennifer Aniston neuron" because the experiment used pictures of the Friends actor to conclude that the same neuron fires up every time a person is shown a picture of her.

In a new study, subjects were shown pictures of famous people like Jennifer Aniston and then pictures of famous people in famous settings – such as Jennifer Aniston in front of the Eiffel Tower. The study revealed that, after perceiving this image, the same neuron that fired for the image of Jennifer Aniston began to fire for a picture of the Eiffel Tower. The connection between the two, and the subsequent encoding on the neuron, was immediate.

Researchers from the University of Leicester and the University of California, Los Angeles, who conducted the study, say that the result demonstrates that a single neuron has actually encoded a memory of the person with the place and shows up as a change in its firing mechanism. Remarkably, the change in a human neuron occurs after a single exposure to the image. Scientists observe that in animals brains such changes take place only after many training sessions.