The Brain Cells That Guide Animals - Issue 81: Maps

It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly's brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very different brains share. As Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, who has studied a variety of animals, from locusts to turtles, has said, "Neural responses can be described by the same mathematical operation … in completely different systems." Vivek Jayaraman, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, and a former student of Laurent's, believes that neuroscientists are on the verge of identifying some of these deep neural rules. Grasping them would advance another neuroscientific dream: to be able to predict animal behavior as easily as Newton could predict the behavior of a moving object. Jayaraman and a small number of researchers studying the brain's GPS have, in fact, already experienced the thrill of discovering one such rule.