They can walk, hover and even sing love songs to woo male mates – all with a brain that’s smaller than Pinhead.

Now for the first time, scientists researching a fly’s brain have identified the position, size and connections of each of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections.

This is the most detailed analysis of the brain of an adult animal to date.

The new research led a leading independent brain expert to call the breakthrough a “huge leap” in our understanding of our own brains.

One of the research leaders said it would shed new light on the “mechanisms of thought”.

Dr Gregory Jeffreys, of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, told BBC News that at present we do not know how the network of brain cells in each of our heads helps us understand each other and the world around us. How enables one to interact with. ,

“What are the connections? How do signals flow through the systems that let us process information to recognize your face, that let you hear my voice, and turn these words into electrical signals?

“Mapping the fly brain is truly remarkable and will help us understand how our brain works.”

We have millions of times more brain cells, or neurons, than the fruit fly that was studied. So how can a wiring diagram of an insect’s brain help scientists learn about how we think?

The pictures that scientists have made, which are Published in Nature JournalShow a tangle of stars that is as beautiful as it is complex.

Its size and structure are important in explaining how such a small organelle can accomplish such powerful computational tasks. Developing a poppy seed-sized computer capable of all these tasks is far beyond the capability of modern science.

Dr. Mala Murthy of Princeton University, one of the project’s co-leaders, said the new wiring diagram, known scientifically as the connectome, will be “transformational for neuroscientists.”

“This will help researchers better understand how a healthy brain works. In the future we hope it will be possible to compare what happens when things go wrong in our brains.

This is a view supported by Dr. Lucia Prieto Godino, a group leader in brain research at the Francis Crick Institute in London, who is independent of the research team.

“Researchers have completed the connectome of an ordinary worm that has 300 wires and a maggot that has three thousand wires, but to have the complete connectome of something with 130,000 wires is an amazing technological achievement that will make it possible to find connectomes for larger brains. Paves the way for a rat and perhaps our own in many decades.”

Researchers have been able to identify separate circuits for many individual functions and show how they are connected.

For example, the wires associated with movement are at the base of the brain, while the wires that process vision are toward the side. The latter involves many more neurons because seeing requires much more computational power.

While scientists already knew about the individual circuits, they didn’t know how they were linked together.

Other researchers are already using circuit diagrams, for example to figure out why flies are so hard to swallow.

Vision circuits detect which direction your rolled-up newspaper is coming from, and they send signals to the fly’s legs.

But the important thing is that they send a strong jump signal to the legs facing away from the object of their impending demise. So you could say they leap without thinking – faster than the speed of thought, in fact.

This discovery may explain why we humans who harvest wood rarely encounter squash flies.

The Fly Connectome is available to any scientist who wants to use it To guide their research. Dr. Schlegel believes that the world of neuroscience will see “a flurry of discoveries in the next few years” thanks to this new map.

A human brain is much larger than a fly’s, and we don’t yet have the technology to get all the information about its wiring.

But researchers believe that perhaps it may be possible to have a human connectome in 30 years. He says the fly brain is the beginning of a new, deeper understanding of how our brains work.

The research was conducted by a large international collaboration of scientists called the Flywire Consortium.