Fly Brain Reveals Human Thinking Process

“What are the connections? How does signal flow through this system and allow us to process information to recognize your face, hear my voice and turn these words into electrical impulses?” “The mapping of a fruit fly brain is truly extraordinary and will allow us to gain a much clearer picture of our own brains’ functioning. Humans possess millions of times more neurons than its fruit fly counterpart. How does an insect brain wiring diagram aid scientists in studying our cognition? Images produced by scientists and published in Nature reveal an intricate web of wiring, both beautiful and complicated in its form and function, that holds key insights into why such a small organ can accomplish so many complex computational tasks simultaneously. Making such a machine out of something the size of a poppy seed would be well beyond our capacity as modern science. One of the project co-leaders at Princeton University, Mala Murthy said that this new wiring diagram – commonly known by its scientific term connectome – would prove transformative for neuroscientists. “This tool will assist researchers attempting to gain more insight into how a healthy brain operates and in future we hope that we may be able to compare what happens when things go amiss in our brains. Dr Lucia Prieto Godino of the Francis Crick Institute in London supports this viewpoint as an independent member of their research team. Researchers have created connectomes of simple worms with 300 wires and of maggots with three thousand, but to complete one for something with 130,000 is truly extraordinary and sets us on our journey towards discovering similar connectomes for larger brains like mouse brains – and potentially in future decades ours.” Researchers were able to isolate numerous circuits specialized for specific functions and demonstrate how they connect. Wires involved with movement tend to cluster at the base of the brain while those responsible for vision processing reside more towards its side.” Sight requires more processing power, necessitating more neurons. Scientists were already aware of individual circuits but didn’t fully grasp how they connected together – for instance, why flies are hard to swat. Other researchers are already using circuit diagrams as a resource in understanding why so difficult to swat insects like mosquitoes can be. Vision circuits recognize where your newspaper roll is coming from and relay that signal to a fly’s legs; additionally, stronger jumping signals will be sent directly toward those nearest the source of impending doom. So flies seem to leap off surfaces without needing to think, acting faster than our minds can process information. Perhaps this explains why humans rarely squash them!Gwyndaf Hughes/BBC NewsThe fly brain slicer: it was cut into 7,000 incredbly thin pieces using this microscopic knifeThe wiring diagram was made by using what amounts to an extremely fine cheese grater on an adult fly brain before photographing each of those slices before digitally stitching together all 7,000 slices digitally. Princeton team used artificial intelligence (AI) to extract all the shapes and connections among neurons; unfortunately the AI wasn’t perfect and researchers still needed to manually correct over three million errors by hand – though technically remarkable, their task had only partially completed itself. Dr Philipp Schlegel from the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology noted that without additional context or explanation about each wire’s purpose on a map alone, its meaning would remain obscure. “This data can be thought of like Google Maps for brains: its raw wiring diagram depicting neurons is like knowing which structures correspond with streets and buildings; while its description adds street names, towns’ names, business opening times, phone numbers and reviews to its map.” “To truly benefit, both are essential. For instance, BBC NewsScans show only part of what’s actually there; similarly the fly connectome can assist scientists who wish to guide their research with its help.” Dr Schlegel expects this new map will spark “an avalanche of discoveries over the coming year or two”. Human brains are much bigger than fly brains and we still lack technology capable of accurately recording all information regarding its wiring. But researchers believe it may be possible in 30 years for humans to achieve human connectome. According to them, the fly brain represents the start of an exploration into our own minds based on scientific collaboration via FlyWire Consortium research.