Fly brain sheds light on human thought process

We have a million times as many brain cells, or neurons, than the fruit fly which was studied. So how can the wiring diagram of an insect brain help scientists learn how we think?

The images the scientists have produced, which have been published in the journal Nature, external, show a tangle of wiring that is as beautiful as it is complex.

Its shape and structure holds the key to explaining how such a tiny organ can carry out so many powerful computational tasks. Developing a computer the size of a poppy seed capable of all these tasks is way beyond the ability of modern science.

Dr Mala Murthy, another of the project’s co-leaders, from Princeton University, said the new wiring diagram, known scientifically as a connectome, would be “transformative for neuroscientists”.

“It will help researchers trying to better understand how a healthy brain works. In the future we hope that it will be possible to compare what happens when things go wrong in our brains.”

That is a view backed by Dr Lucia Prieto Godino, a group leader in brain research at the Francis Crick Institute in London, who is independent of the research team.

“Researchers have completed the connectomes of a simple worm which has 300 wires and a maggot which has three thousand, but having a complete connectome of something with 130,000 wires is an amazing technical feat which paves the way for finding the connectomes for larger brains such as the mouse and maybe in several decades our own.”