If you perused the June 23 issue of Nature, you might have been momentarily forgiven for thinking you were reading a celebrity magazine. There, on page 1104, were photos of Halle Berry, Oprah Winfrey, and Julia Roberts. But the story of how those photos – accompanying a Letter on neuroscience – appeared at all are an instructive lesson in how Hollywood and science interact.

The research by Rodrigo Quiroga of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and colleagues in California found neurons that fired to images of Berry and other famous faces and places. It might have appeared almost a month earlier, except for the difficulty the authors had in obtaining permission to use the stars' photographs. After fruitlessly trying to explain to the stars' representatives just what it was they needed these pictures for, they finally had to resort to an image bank. "It was really challenging to settle the copyright issues," says coauthor and University of California, Los Angeles neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried. As a result, the paper contains a disclaimer that the published pictures are similar to, but not always the same, as the ones shown to the subjects.

The experimental protocol included a first session in which epileptic patients with electrodes implanted in their medial temporal lobes were shown dozens of pictures. If a neuron proved selective to a specific picture, then in a second session, the patient was shown variations on it. In Halle Berry's case, that meant everything from her dressed in the Catwoman mask to the text of her name. Despite the disparate images, the neuron would still fire. It is this quality of invariance – one neuron responding to different expressions of a single concept – that most intrigues the researchers. "There appears to be a sparse, explicit, and invariant region of familiar, visual percepts in the human medial temporal lobe," says coauthor Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology. "The neurons didn't respond to another woman in a catsuit."

Neither did a "Jennifer Aniston cell" fire to pictures of Brad Pitt. More importantly, buried in the online supplementary material, is that the same neuron did fire to her Friends costar Lisa Kudrow. "One explanation for invariance is the associations that are formed around a concept," says Fried.

The "Halle Berry neuron" study seems to have garnered press attention that a "my dry cleaner neuron" never would have. Charles Connor of Johns Hopkins University, author of the accompanying News and Views, was taken aback by the interest. He said he'd been interviewed by "at least a dozen" different journalists – that compares to no calls on most things he writes. The story was covered by outlets from the Los Angeles Times to the Associated Press to the Independent. Even Berry's publicist admits that the celebrity hype may have overwhelmed the science: "It kind of glamorized the whole thing," says Karen Samfilippo of Image Management PR. "There's something very cool and scientific, but I think that kind of got passed over."