How A Fly's Brain Calculates Its Position in Space
Published:04 Jan.2022 Source:Rockefeller University
Navigation doesn't always go as planned -- a lesson that flies learn the hard way, when a strong headwind shunts them backward in defiance of their forward-beating wings. Fish swimming upriver, crabs scuttling sideways, and even humans hanging a left while looking to the right contend with similar challenges. How the brain calculates an animal's direction of travel when the head is pointing one way and the body is moving in another is a mystery in neuroscience.
A new study makes significant headway on solving this mystery by reporting that the fly brain has a set of neurons that signal the direction in which the body is traveling, regardless of the direction in which the head is pointing. The findings, published in Nature, also describe in detail how the fly's brain calculates this signal from more basic sensory inputs.