They leg eggs on your food. They vomit and defecate often. They carry a range of diseases. But…their pinhead-sized brains might just be useful for science.
Experts recently researched and analyzed the over 130,000 neurons and 50 million connections in a fruit fly’s brain, as well as classified over 8,400 different cell types. While this might seem irrelevant to us, their discoveries can actually shed light on human thought processes.
In fact, their fly brain map is the most detailed analysis of an adult animal brain that scientists have ever made. It’s a “huge leap” when it comes to understanding human brains, according to a leading brain specialist.
How Fruit Flies Can Unlock Mysteries about the brain
“You might be asking why we should care about the brain of a fruit fly,” said Sebastian Seung, a co-leader on the FlyWire project and professor of computer science and neuroscience at Princeton University. “My simple answer is that if we can truly understand how any brain functions, it’s bound to tell us something about all brains.”
For example, you’ve likely noticed that flies are difficult to swat. Researchers used circuit diagrams to understand exactly how they do it. A fly’s vision circuit can detect which direction a threat is coming from, sending signals to the fly’s legs to encourage movement away from the object. This signal is stronger in the legs that are facing away from the threat. This all happens so quickly that it almost seems instinctual.
Now, how might this relate to human brains? We, too, have similar reflexes that allow us to act without thinking, typically in an attempt to protect ourselves.
Right now, experts have a pretty limited view of how our brains work in terms of interacting with each other and the world around us, said Gregory Jefferis of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). However, “the mapping of the fly brain is really remarkable and will help us get a real grasp of how our own brains work,” he told BBC News, which spoke to several members of the project.
“What are the connections?” he asked. “How do the signals flow through the system that can let us process the information to recognize your face, that lets you hear my voice and turn these words into electrical signals?” Scientists are now one step closer to having answers to these questions.
Mapping the Fruit Fly’s Neural Network
These researchers used several different techniques that could be scaled for larger brains. For example, scientists used a fly brain slicer to cut the brain into 7,000 pieces. They then applied artificial intelligence to form connections between the neurons and create a sort of map with different shapes.
“This data is a bit like Google Maps but for brains: the raw wiring diagram between neurons is like knowing which structures correspond to streets and buildings,” said Philipp Schlegel of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
According to Mala Murthy, another one of the project’s co-leaders, if neuroscientists can learn how a normal, healthy brain works, they’ll be more likely to understand when and how something goes wrong in the human mind.
The post Fly Brains Are Wildly Complex, But Scientists Finally Mapped One appeared first on VICE.
The post Fly Brains Are Wildly Complex, But Scientists Finally Mapped One appeared first on VICE.
