Researchers Upload Fly's Brain to Matrix, Let It Control Virtual Body

"For decades, whole-brain emulation has been the tantalizing counterpart to artificial intelligence. Copy a biological brain, neuron by neuron and synapse by synapse, and run it. The video demonstrates what the company believes is the world's first embodiment of a whole-brain emulation that produces multiple behaviors."

"The team used the pre-existing FlyWire connectome, a Princeton-led effort to create a complete wiring diagram of a fruit fly brain. For their research, they found that their computational model predicted the motor behavior of the simulated fly with a 95 percent accuracy."

"We show that activation of sugar-sensing or water-sensing gustatory neurons in the computational model accurately predicts neurons that respond to tastes and are required for feeding initiation."

Eon Systems has developed a whole-brain emulation by simulating the complete neural architecture of an adult fruit fly, containing 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections. The company placed this computational model in a virtual environment where it demonstrates multiple behaviors including stretching, grooming, and feeding. This work builds on research published in Nature in 2024, which created a complete computational model of the fruit fly brain using the FlyWire connectome, a comprehensive wiring diagram of the fruit fly's neural structure. The computational model predicts the simulated fly's motor behavior with 95 percent accuracy, accurately modeling feeding and grooming behaviors through activation of gustatory neurons.

Read at Futurism