Fly brain breakthrough ‘huge leap’ to unlock human mind

Flies can walk, hover, and males even sing love songs to attract mates, all with a brain smaller than a pinhead.

For the first time, scientists have mapped the position, shape, and connections of every one of the 130,000 cells and 50 million connections in a fly’s brain. This is the most detailed analysis of an adult animal brain ever achieved.

An independent brain specialist called this breakthrough a “huge leap” in understanding our own brains. One of the research leaders mentioned it would illuminate “the mechanism of thought.”

Dr. Gregory Jefferis from the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge told BBC News that we currently don’t understand how the network of brain cells in our heads allows us to interact with each other and the world.

“What are the connections? How do signals flow through the system to let us process information, recognize faces, hear voices, and turn words into electrical signals?”

The mapping of the fly brain is remarkable and will help us better understand how our own brains function.

Humans have a million times more brain cells, or neurons, than the fruit fly studied. So, how can the wiring diagram of an insect brain help scientists understand human thought?

The images published in the journal Nature reveal a complex and beautiful tangle of wiring. The shape and structure of this tiny organ explain how it performs powerful computational tasks. Creating a computer the size of a poppy seed capable of these tasks is beyond modern science.

Dr. Mala Murthy from Princeton University, a co-leader of the project, said the new wiring diagram, known as a connectome, would be “transformative for neuroscientists.” It will aid researchers in understanding how a healthy brain functions and, in the future, in comparing what happens when things go wrong in our brains.

Dr. Lucia Prieto Godino from the Francis Crick Institute in London, who is independent of the research team, supports this view. She noted that while researchers have completed the connectomes of a simple worm with 300 connections and a maggot with 3,000, achieving a complete connectome of an organism with 130,000 connections is an incredible technical feat. This paves the way for mapping larger brains, such as those of mice, and potentially, in several decades, our own.

Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *