Business Standard ·
Economy, business and finance
From dancing to playing poker, is there anything fruit fly brain can't do?
For years, researchers worked to develop sophisticated imaging techniques to map the connections within the nervous systems of various organisms.
What can a fruit fly do? Buzz around ripe bananas, sure. But maybe, a whole lot more. Like parallel park. Or play Minecraft.
Creative internet users have in recent days taken a complete map of a fruit fly’s 166,000 neurons, published by Google, and made simulated flies do some things that are pretty impressive, given that these insects have a brain the size of a poppy seed. One has been trained to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Another dances to the Village People’s YMCA in response to four tones. Others have envisioned fruit flies playing poker and blackjack and slicing a doner kebab.
In general, the goal of these engineers and artists is not to show what a fly can do, but “what’s the dumbest thing we can make it do,” said Mark Unthank, a software developer who got a fly to parallel park a car after hundreds of failed attempts. Unthank, who lives in Italy, also programmed a fly to use a car’s blinkers when turning because he was frustrated that so few human drivers seem to use them.
Producing the map of the fly’s brain, on the other hand, was anything but easy. It was meant to advance the study of neuroscience.
For years, researchers worked to develop sophisticated imaging techniques to map the connections within the nervous systems of various organisms. Some have focused on fruit flies because of the insect’s relative lack of complexity; while the fly has just 166,000 neurons, a human being has about 86 billion. Scientists call the neural maps connectomes, similar to the genomes that help map the genes that determine an organism’s traits.