Fly Brain vs Mushka

A fruit fly, with its brain on show. Watch its nervous system light up in real time as it sees through your camera, listens through your microphone and responds to touch and motion. What it senses • Wave a hand or finger in front of the camera and its optic lobes light up, each eye from its own side. • Talk, clap or play music and the hearing centre in its brain flares up. • Turn your phone and its balance organs light up. • Tap one of its legs and a signal runs up that leg's own nerve. Tap its body and it shudders. How it behaves • Talk to it, or make a loud noise, and its wings buzz. • Show it a strong colour, like a piece of fruit, and it sets off walking. • Move something suddenly in front of the camera and it freezes with caution. • Bring something quickly towards the camera and it gets frightened and tries to escape. • Leave it alone for a while and it stops to clean itself. Inside its head The brain is built from real measurements: 34 regions in their measured shapes, drawn in over 3,000 points of light, and more than 500 real neurons traced from electron microscope images, each along its own path. Open the brain view to see 12 regions named, then pinch right in until the lobula plate splits into its four layers. The shapes and the neurons are real. The activity is illustrated, not recorded. On your table Tap AR to put the fly in your room. Pinch it from 5 cm to 20 m long and walk all the way around it. Make it yours Pick from eight skins, or go see-through and watch the brain light up inside the head. Private The camera and microphone are optional, and nothing they pick up is recorded, stored or sent anywhere. No ads, no accounts. Brain region shapes and neurons are based on public data from Janelia's FlyEM project and the Male CNS team (HHMI Janelia, the University of Cambridge, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Google Research), used under CC BY 4.0. Fly Brain is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.

Meet Mushka, a fruit fly that lives on your table in AR — and whose behaviour comes from a simulation of a real fly's nervous system. Scientists have mapped every neuron and every connection of a fruit fly's central nervous system. Mushka runs a simplified simulation of that wiring diagram right on your iPhone: 164,606 neurons and millions of connections, spiking in real time. WHAT YOU CAN DO • Place her on any real table with your camera. • Tap to drop sugar — she walks over, tastes it with her feet, and her proboscis extends. That decision comes from her simulated taste neurons reaching the proboscis motor neuron. • Swipe your hand at her — her looming-detector neurons fire, the giant fiber escape neuron spikes, and she jumps away from your hand. On iPhones with LiDAR your real hand is the stimulus. • Watch her brain: every neuron is a dot at its real position; every flash is a spike. • Record a clip — it goes straight to your Photos. HONEST ABOUT WHAT IS REAL • Brain decides: feeding, escape, turning towards moving things — each checked against controls. • Animation: the way she walks, her gait, how far a jump carries her. The app labels which is which. • This is a simplified simulation of a wiring diagram. It is not a living fly and not an uploaded mind.