The First Complete Brain Map of an Insect May Reveal Secrets for Better AI

Breakthroughs don't often happen in neuroscience, but we just had one. In a tour-de-force, an international team released the full brain connectivity map of the young fruit fly, described in a paper published last week in Science. Containing 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, the map--called a connectome--is the most complex whole-brain wiring diagram to date. "It's a'wow,'" said Dr. Shinya Yamamoto at Baylor College of Medicine, who was not involved in the work. Far from uninvited guests at the dinner table, Drosophila melanogaster is a neuroscience darling.