Questions and answers
What the fly is, where its brain comes from, what is measured, and how to take part.
TheFlyBrain is a 3D fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) whose eyes feed a spiking model of the complete male fruit fly central nervous system, the MaleCNS v1.0 connectome with 166,700 neurons and 25,582,938 directed connections, and a public registry of the 68 experiments the fly has been put through. It is a division of Paranoid American Labs.
The fly is a computer model. Its body is NeuroMechFly v2, derived from micro-CT scans of a female fruit fly and articulated in 69 segments. Its nervous system is the MaleCNS v1.0 connectome, reconstructed from electron microscopy of a male fruit fly by FlyEM at HHMI Janelia. No living fly is used. The fly is named Specimen 237.
On the workstation, every spike is produced by a leaky integrate-and-fire model of the full connectome running in 20 ms steps, and the spikes are recorded, not drawn. It is a mathematical model of the wiring diagram, not an electrophysiological recording of a living fly. The neural panels in the browser previews on this site are simulated.
A connectome is a complete map of the neurons in a nervous system and the synaptic connections between them. MaleCNS v1.0 maps the entire central nervous system of a male fruit fly, brain and ventral nerve cord, at the level of individual synapses.
The connectome is MaleCNS v1.0 from the FlyEM project at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus, published under a CC BY 4.0 license. The spiking network is built with flybrain 0.1.0, and the body is NeuroMechFly v2 from the flygym project.
In every experiment, the scene is rendered from the fly’s own head and delivered to the model as retinal input on a 32-column pathway. Display settings change what you see on screen, never what the fly sees. A compound-eye inspector shows the scene through 1,709 micro-CT-derived ommatidia directions.
No. The connectome’s weights are fixed, and no plasticity is added, so the model does not learn between or during experiments. Its responses come from the wiring diagram as published.
The registry holds 68 experiments in six areas: rituals and ceremonies (including a Masonic Master Mason degree and a Roman Rite Mass), film and media, rides and expeditions, history and training, altered states, and laboratory assays and sensory benches. Each has its own page with setup, measurement, limitations and sources.
In Master Mason, the fly is the candidate in a 52-stage Third Degree ceremony condensed from Duncan’s Ritual of Freemasonry (1866), with 27 other flies holding the lodge offices, through the raising and the closing. It runs in your browser.
7 experiments run in your browser on this site, with camera views, a compound-eye inspector, wireframe views and a simulated neural panel. Research Associates ($10 a month on Patreon) get the full workstation’s source code, which runs every experiment and the full connectome model on macOS, Windows or Linux.
Anyone can suggest an experiment by posting it on social media and tagging the lab. A commissioned experiment costs $237, is guaranteed, and is delivered as a 1–4 minute recording within 14 days with a permanent page in the registry. Brands can sponsor an experiment from $1,000, with the placement disclosed.
No. The body comes from a female fruit fly and the nervous system from a male, and the two are not anatomically registered. The workstation keeps that distinction explicit in its documentation.
TheFlyBrain is made by Paranoid American Labs, a division of Paranoid American. Recordings are published on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X.