3 ms·

With 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections, called synapses, the result is by far the most complex map of a whole brain ever made. It's an impressive achieveme

With 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections, called synapses, the result is by far the most complex map of a whole brain ever made. It's an impressive achievement but I'm not sure I'd call that a whole brain. It's a larval proto-brain with less than 4% the neurons of an adult fly.

xipho 4y ago
Science and Nature are the canonical exaggerators when it comes to headlines. Whole genome, whole mitochondria, complete, total, you name it, there is (nearly?) always an invisible asterisk at the end. When these words are use then Materials and Methods tell you what actually happened. What's completely crazy in this research is the ability to thin-section fly brains. Thousands and thousands of slices _of a fly brain_, good old physical science at the heart, crowd-sourced to connect the dots (though I'm not positive that's the case in this paper). The open-hardware imaging tools used in some studies like this are also super cool- https://openspim.org/ https://openspim.org/.
- seesawtron 4y ago
  This is an electron microscopy based study, not light microscopy (i.e. SPIM or open-spim). Or did you mean something else?
moonbreams 4y ago
larvae behave, they learn, they forage, they do have a brain.
- causality0 4y ago
  Do they learn? What behaviors make a fruit fly larva more intelligent than a jellyfish?
  - moonbreams 4y ago
    Well granted they're solving quadratic equations, but neither are the adults. For instance, if you expose larvae a rewarding stimulus like sugar along with an odour, they will later be attracted to that odour. That is by definition learning, simple learning, but we have to start somewhere i guess. Interestingly there is some evidence that the memory lasts through to the adult stage, despite the fact that a lot of the brain is actually rewired during pupation.
    - causality0 4y ago
      Interesting, with the caveat that the odor/reward experiment was performed on larvae at a development stage with 10,000 neurons, not 3,000.

xipho 4y ago

Science and Nature are the canonical exaggerators when it comes to headlines. Whole genome, whole mitochondria, complete, total, you name it, there is (nearly?) always an invisible asterisk at the end. When these words are use then Materials and Methods tell you what actually happened. What's completely crazy in this research is the ability to thin-section fly brains. Thousands and thousands of slices _of a fly brain_, good old physical science at the heart, crowd-sourced to connect the dots (though I'm not positive that's the case in this paper). The open-hardware imaging tools used in some studies like this are also super cool- https://openspim.org/ https://openspim.org/.

seesawtron 4y ago
This is an electron microscopy based study, not light microscopy (i.e. SPIM or open-spim). Or did you mean something else?

moonbreams 4y ago

larvae behave, they learn, they forage, they do have a brain.

causality0 4y ago
Do they learn? What behaviors make a fruit fly larva more intelligent than a jellyfish?
- moonbreams 4y ago
  Well granted they're solving quadratic equations, but neither are the adults. For instance, if you expose larvae a rewarding stimulus like sugar along with an odour, they will later be attracted to that odour. That is by definition learning, simple learning, but we have to start somewhere i guess. Interestingly there is some evidence that the memory lasts through to the adult stage, despite the fact that a lot of the brain is actually rewired during pupation.
  - causality0 4y ago
    Interesting, with the caveat that the odor/reward experiment was performed on larvae at a development stage with 10,000 neurons, not 3,000.