Researchers understand brain structure and have mapped it out in detail, but they still don’t know exactly how they process data — for that, a detailed “circle map” of the brain is needed.
Now, scientists have mapped out the most advanced of these creatures: fruit fly larvae. It’s called a neural network, and it maps out the insect’s 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, Neuroscience News It’s been reported. The map will help study researchers better understand how insect and animal brains control behavior, learning, bodily functions, and more. Such work can inspire improvements to AI networks.
“To date, we have not seen any brain structures except for the C. elegans roundworm, low-stringed tadpoles and marine annelid larvae, all containing several hundred neurons,” said the professor. Marta Zlatek of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. “This means neuroscience has been working for the most part without circular maps. Without knowing the structure of the brain, we guess how calculations are performed. But now, we can start to gain a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works.”
To create the map, the team scanned thousands of slices of the caterpillar’s brain using an electron microscope, then combined them into a detailed map, noting all the neural connections. From there, they used computational tools to identify potential information-flow pathways and the types of “circuits” in the insect brain. They even note that some of the structural features are very similar to modern deep learning architectures.
Scientists have created detailed maps of fruit fly brains, which are much more complex than fruit fly larvae. However, this map doesn’t include all the detailed connections needed to get a map of the actual circuitry of their brain.
As a next step, the team will investigate structures used for behavioral functions such as learning and decision making, examining the activity of the network when the insect performs certain activities. And while fruit fly larvae are simple insects, the researchers hope to see similar patterns in other animals. “In the same way that genes are preserved across the animal kingdom, I believe the basic motifs of the circuits that drive these basic behaviors will also be preserved,” said Zlatek.
