The First Multi-Behavior Brain Upload - Lemmy.World

In 2024, Eon senior scientist Philip Shiu and collaborators published in Nature a computational model of the entire adult Drosophila melanogaster brain, containing more than 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections, built from the FlyWire connectome and machine learning predictions of neurotransmitter identity. That model predicted motor behavior at 95% accuracy. But it was disembodied: a brain without a body, activation without physics, motor outputs with nowhere to go. Now the brain has somewhere to go. Building on previous work, including Shiu et al.’s whole-brain computational model, the NeuroMechFly v2 embodied simulation framework, and Özdil et al.’s research on centralized brain networks underlying body part coordination, this demonstration integrates Eon’s connectome-based brain emulation with a physics-simulated fly body in MuJoCo. The result: multiple distinct behaviors driven by the emulated brain’s own circuit dynamics.** Sensory input flows in, neural activity propagates through the complete connectome, motor commands flow out, and a physically simulated body executes the output, closing the loop from perception to action for the first time in a whole-brain emulation.**