🧠 Scientists Ran a Real Fly Brain Inside a Virtual Body
@science

📝 A team of researchers has recreated the entire brain of a fruit fly neuron-by-neuron and launched it inside a simulated body.

This isn’t a neural network trained to imitate a fly.
It’s something far stranger: a structural copy of the real biological brain.

The system includes roughly:

▪️ ~125,000 neurons
▪️ ~50 million synapses
▪️ The original wiring diagram reconstructed from connectomics data

Virtual sensory signals enter the model, neural activity propagates through the network exactly as it would in the real insect, and the simulated body moves in response.

In other words: the fly’s brain is effectively running inside a digital organism.

🔬 Researchers built the system using detailed neural mapping and simulation tools developed in the emerging field of whole-brain emulation.

The long-term goal is even more ambitious:
👉 the same approach could eventually be applied to mouse brains, which are several orders of magnitude more complex.

If that succeeds, it would represent a major step toward true digital organisms — simulated bodies driven by real biological neural architectures.

🤖 Anime fans of Pantheon may feel a sense of déjà vu.

🔗 More details: https://eon.systems

💬 Discussion:
If a brain’s wiring and signals can be perfectly reproduced in software, where exactly does the organism “exist”?

#neuroscience #connectomics #simulation #digitalbiology #AI #science