Courtesy of the Daily Grail - this is being billed over-excitedly (not by the scientists who did the work) as "the missing link between brain matter and consciousness." That doesn't make much sense to me, but if the finding is right it seems interesting (1) that such a fundamental feature has only just been discovered and (2) that it's found in humans and not rodents (obviously the two factors are linked).
Here's a news article about the work. It explains that whereas most studies on neurons have used tissue from rodents, the new research looked at human tissue from a particular part of the brain, and found that in processing their input to produce an output, individual neurons not only performed the logical AND ("both A and B") and OR ("either A or B or both A and B") operations, as previously assumed, but also the XOR operation (that is, "A or B but not not both A and B"):
https://thenextweb.com/insights/2020/01/...ciousness/
The abstract is available here, but the text itself is behind a paywall:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6473/83
Here's a news article about the work. It explains that whereas most studies on neurons have used tissue from rodents, the new research looked at human tissue from a particular part of the brain, and found that in processing their input to produce an output, individual neurons not only performed the logical AND ("both A and B") and OR ("either A or B or both A and B") operations, as previously assumed, but also the XOR operation (that is, "A or B but not not both A and B"):
https://thenextweb.com/insights/2020/01/...ciousness/
The abstract is available here, but the text itself is behind a paywall:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6473/83