When scientists revealed the first in-depth map of a male fruit fly’s brain and nervous system—its connectome—in early September, neuroscience researchers rejoiced. Fruit flies are a key animal model, and studying their brains can help illuminate pathways and functions our species share.
Then the chronically online got hold of it. With access to the public dataset for the atlas, people soon set the “fly” to work in various virtual environments—from the video game Doom to bitcoin trading sites.
“It’s certainly an unexpected application of producing a connectome, but it’s fun, and it puts a spotlight on the research and allows the general public to get an entry into an otherwise complicated and difficult topic,” says Gerald M. Rubin, head of biology at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia and one of the researchers behind the dataset.
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This connectome, which includes more than 166,000 neurons’ shapes and sizes, as well as the connections among them, is the fourth extensive map of its kind in flies and builds on two decades of study aimed at understanding how brains work. Researchers say this dataset, the first from a male fruit fly, is particularly intriguing for analyzing brain similarities and differences between sexes.
But researchers are quick to caveat: this is not an “uploaded” brain.
Bing Wen Brunton, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, says many programmers uploaded the connectome dataset to an artificial-intelligence model, which could then take the catalog and train it to do a task—such as playing chess or video games.
Neurons are essentially processing machines: they receive inputs, then use different parameters to determine how to respond, often by releasing a signal to connected neurons. The model parameters change every time the virtual “fly” gets closer to accomplishing its task—in other words, the connectome shifts, Brunton says. “It’s being modified, sometimes by a lot, until it accomplishes the task the programmer has set out for it to do,” she explains.
Brunton studies how neural activity relates to the physical body, and she says we’re far from a sci-fi-like “brain upload” to a virtual environment or a machine. But as long as people don’t think flies are actually playing video games, she adds, “if the broader public is really engaging with this dataset and having fun with it, what else do we want as scientists?”
Connectome datasets have been publicly available before, but this release coincided with the rise of AI “vibe coding,” and its popularity only grew with the “memeability” of flies doing absurd things, says Nick Walton, founder and CEO of AI game company Latitude. Walton has played around with the dataset himself, training it, for instance, to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
Walton knows there isn’t a fly’s mind in his computer, but the intersection of biological intelligence and AI still intrigues him. “Is this way more advanced than just training something with a machine-learning model? Not really,” he says. “It’s more a capture of this underlying idea of what happens if you upload beings with biological intelligence into a digital world.”
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