New York ? Halle Berry? Jennifer Aniston? Everybody knows them. And now a surprising study finds that even individual cells in your brain act as if they recognize them.

The work could help shed light on how the brain stores information, an expert said.

When scientists sampled brain cell activity in people who were scrutinizing dozens of pictures, they found some individual cells that reacted to a particular celebrity, landmark, animal or object.

In one case, a single cell was activated by different photos of Berry, including some in her “Catwoman” costume, a drawing of her and even the words, “Halle Berry.”

The findings appear in a part of the brain that transforms what people perceive into what they’ll eventually remember, said Dr. Itzhak Fried of the University of California, Los Angeles, a senior investigator on the project.

The findings do not mean that a particular person or object is recognized and remembered by only one brain cell, Fried said. “There is not only one cell that codes for Jennifer Aniston. That would be impossible,” Fried said.

Nor do they mean that a given brain cell will react to only one person or object, he said, because the study participants were tested with only a relatively limited number of pictures. In fact, some cells were found to respond to more than one person, or to a person and an object.

What the study does suggest, Fried and colleagues say in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, is that the brain appears to use relatively few cells to record something it sees. That’s in contrast to the idea that it uses a huge network of brain cells instead.

It’s surprising that an individual neuron would react so specifically to a given person, said the study’s other senior investigator, Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology. “It’s much more specific than people used to think.”

The “really dramatic finding,” he said, is that a single brain cell can respond so consistently to completely different pictures of a given person. “That will surprise everybody,” Connor said.

Oddly, when that participant was shown photos of Aniston paired with actor Brad Pitt, from whom Aniston later separated, the brain cell didn’t respond.

“I don’t know if it was a prophetic thing,” Fried said.