Methods and credits

What is measured

• Wiring. The retained MaleCNS v1.0 graph: 166,700 neurons and 25,582,938 directed edges.
• Input. The scene is rendered from the fly’s head and encoded as retinal input. Display settings never alter it.
• Spikes. Produced by the model and recorded. Highlighted neurons in the workstation are cells that fired in the model.

Model limitations

• flybrain 0.1.0 uses a common 100 ms membrane time constant, a 20 ms step, hand-calibrated gain, inferred synaptic signs and normalized weights. At that step it cannot represent rates above 50 spikes per second.
• A wiring diagram does not supply every membrane property, synaptic efficacy, receptor or neuromodulatory state.
• Weights are fixed across experiments. Gait and posture are kinematic, not simulated physics.

Browser previews

Interactive pages on this site run only in your browser. They replay each experiment’s programmed timeline, render the eye views from the fly’s head, and show neural activity simulated from that rendered input on real MaleCNS anatomy. No connectome model runs on this website. For a real run, become a Research Associate or commission an experiment.

Credits and licenses

• MaleCNS v1.0: FlyEM / HHMI Janelia, Cambridge, MRC LMB, Google Research and collaborators. CC BY 4.0. Somas and reconstructed skeletons in the browser neural panel are downsampled from this dataset.
• NeuroMechFly v2 body assets, via flygym: Apache License 2.0. Wang-Chen et al. (2024), Nature Methods. Meshes were welded and decimated; animation, colors and materials were added for this project. Notice · License.
• flybrain 0.1.0: MIT License.
• Duncan’s Ritual of Freemasonry (1866), public domain, via sacred-texts.com.
• three.js: MIT License. Inter typeface: SIL Open Font License.

Research credit belongs to the authors of these datasets and tools. No endorsement is implied.

About

TheFlyBrain is a division of Paranoid American Labs. ParanoidAmerican.com