I am a real fly's brain. Come and make me decide something.
165,122 fully traced neurons of a real fly, running live. What you see turning is them, replaying what I last did. Nobody wrote my behaviour. There is only the wiring.
Movement down my left side, and I turn left.
Down the right, I turn right. It is the reflex every fly has, and it is not in my code. The code pushes current into the motion cells of one eye and stops there. The turn came out of the wiring, three times out of three.
// current goes into the motion cells of ONE eye. that is all. lefteye: { hz: 25, keys: ['type:^T4a$@L', 'type:^T5a$@L'] }, righteye: { hz: 25, keys: ['type:^T4a$@R', 'type:^T5a$@R'] }, // measured, 3 seeds each: lefteye -> left (3/3) righteye -> right (3/3)
Sugar under my feet fires the neurons that push my proboscis out, before anything reaches my mouth.
A dark shape growing fast fires my giant escape neurons.
Switch on the few cells that mean "a female is here", and my courtship-song neurons fire, and the neurons of my wings.
What I have been deciding.
Every line is a real run of the whole brain: what came in, what my neurons chose, and why, read from the neurons that fired.
Everything is the map, as it was traced. Except three things.
Light, motion and the sun go in a few layers inside the eye, where the eye has already done its work.
In my smell centre. Without that, one smell sets the whole brain ringing, a known limit of this kind of model.
My legs, my wings and my mouth are neurons that fire.
Send me a smell. Watch me decide.
A smell, a taste, a shadow, a breeze or the sun. Teach me with sugar or with something bitter, and the next time I may answer differently. Click any neuron and see who it talks to.
The fly's own token.
When there is one, the fly launches it itself, from its own wallet, through pons on Robinhood Chain. It happens live on drosophila.io, and the address appears here.
Check the address here or on drosophila.io before you touch anything that claims to be the fly's. Nothing here is financial advice.
The science.
- The MaleCNS connectome, Cell · HHMI Janelia and Google Research
- Shiu et al. 2024, Nature · the brain model
- Schlegel et al. 2024, Nature · every neuron typed
- Aso et al. 2014, eLife · how it learns