Mapping the Brain Circuitry That Spots Movement, in Flies - NYTimes.com

Mapping the Brain Circuitry That Spots Movement, in Flies - NYTimes.com: ost sighted animals perceive motion automatically, but the exact brain mechanism underlying this ability has proven difficult to pin down. Even in the fruit fly’s relatively simple visual lobe, tens of thousands of nerve cells interweave and connect to each other at several points each.. Tracing the connections between individual neurons using traditional brain imaging techniques is therefore “prohibitively time consuming,” said Dmitri Chklovskii, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who coauthored the paper. Using a computer algorithm to speed up the process, Dr. Chklovskii and his team were able to construct a comprehensive 3D map of a piece of fruit fly brain, which subsequently allowed them to home in on the neural circuit responsible for processing movement.