How the fruit fly's brain knows where the fruit fly's going

How the fruit fly’s brain knows where the fruit fly’s going

When we turn our head to one side, the visual field “turns” the other way. When we are on a train, the landscape slides by us. However, we know that we are the ones moving, while the world remains in place. How does the brain avoid being fooled by apparent motion? A team of neuroscientists from the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, discovered in the fruit fly’s brain a neural circuit that creates a faithful internal representation of the direction and velocity of the insect’s locomotion, allowing it to know where it is going at any given time. Their results, which could also be valid for other animals, including humans, have been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. In fact, we take this capacity – being able to perceive that…


Link to Full Article: How the fruit fly’s brain knows where the fruit fly’s going