Silencing the presumed members of an assembly, normally causally related to an event, may not lead to the absence of an effect. For example, temporary or even permanent silencing of ‘Halle Berry neurons’ in the hippocampus and associated structures (Quian Quiroga et al., 2005) may not erase the semantic representation of the actress. The reason is that specific firing of these explicit neurons (‘grandmother cells’; Barlow, 1972) is a result of a dynamic and hierarchical relationship between winner neurons and their transiently inhibited competing peers. Elimination of winners may be instantaneously replaced by runner-up neurons.
