Originally published at: This is the first wiring map of an insect's brain | Boing Boing
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Should be zooming in on his arse, not his head
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From now on I’m going to say “Sorry, I have a mind like a ball pit” when I’m distracted and unfocused.
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By comparison, a human brain has 86 billion neurons.
So, what were people saying about ChatGP being AI?
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I’m going to say it smugly, to explain why I’ve just been able to say something else clever. Without the Sorry!
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ChatGPT is stealing from 86 billion term papers
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Amazing! I first heard about such a brain mapping project at Columbia University back around 1970. They were taking a similar approach, lots of cross sections and then carefully tracking the connection paths. The tools have gotten much, much better with better imaging, much of the tracking automated, and appropriate databases. Still, 50 years is a long time. Odds are we’ll be seeing a lot more brain mappings over the next ten years, and there’s a good chance we’ll get some serious insights into how thinking works.
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It’s unfortunate that the album cover 
is not as blisteringly amazing as the guitar solo 
.
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Truly… yet considering what comes out of his mouth… 
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… dunno why we have to go to a video site for audio links but that seems to be how it’s done
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Does this fruit fly larva have 3016 neurons; or do fruit flies whose development is not atypically perturbed reliably grow brains of that exact size?
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Just this fly
Some animals always have the same neurons; the C. elegans roundworm referenced in the OP all have the same 302 neurons (at least the hermaphrodites, a few animals are males which have 289 neurons). Insects grow new neurons as they grow (an adult fly has ~30 times as many as a larva) and show individual variability in their brains (although way more conserved than us). The 3016 neurons in this data are not all identifiable (neurons the same across all members of a species), just a representative connectome of a D. melanogaster larva
As far as all fruit flies, there are dozens of species of fruit flies with a lot of variability between them, so nowhere close to the exact same neurons for all fruit flies
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Is having identifiable neurons more or less purely a function of size(with, presumably, it becoming impossible to execute a cell-accurate body plan at larger sizes as the limited amount of context a given dividing or differentiating cell has becomes an increasingly small piece of the overall picture and the room to accumulate perturbations grows); or is it a much less predictable thing, with some tiny organisms exhibiting none of that stability(and potentially getting beaten out as a model organism by the more elegans competition) and some very large ones still having certain neurons that are strikingly reliable even if bulk CNS is predictable only at the level of larger structures?
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I don’t know of any very small animals with unpredictable neural development. There are large animals with identifiable neurons, though. Squids for instance get quite large with some identifiable neurons conserved across squid species of very different sizes. There is a tradeoff between flexibility and reliability. In general I’d say that animals that live longer, grow continuously, or need to learn more require flexibility in neuron differentiation.
Identifiable neurons in animals larger than worms tend to be used for predator avoidance behaviors that need to be functional from birth for survival. Nearly all teleost fish (and ampibians) have the same Mauthner neuron for escape. I study an identifiable neuron in grasshoppers that is functional from birth but continues to develop as the animal grows – gaining very precisely arranged connections from thousands of new neurons.
In humans, we are yet to find a single identifiable neuron. Neural stem cells that can become very different neurons are directed by local cues
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…but pupa of a fruit fly. “Fools! This isn’t even my final form!”
What fun trained behaviors do we get? Can it masticate a crime reporting article through a sheet of rice paper?
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