flylabs is a lab for the fruit-fly brain. Click through its regions, look up the neurons by name, and play with the circuits themselves — the motion detector that reads movement, the ring that holds a heading, the neuron that fires the escape.
Pick a region to light it up. Everything in the fly's head has an address, and every address has a job.
Each one is a real, named cell type in the fly brain — what it sees, what it computes, and how fast it answers.
Three famous fly circuits, implemented as they were published — and wired to your cursor.
Two neighbouring photoreceptors, one of them delayed, multiplied together. Do it in both directions and subtract: what survives is motion. T4 correlates brightening edges, T5 darkening ones.
Sixteen EPG neurons tile 360°. Neighbours excite each other, Δ7 cells inhibit everyone, and the network settles into a single bump of activity — the fly's sense of which way it is facing. Push it and it follows; let go and it holds.
Looming cells don't measure size, they measure how fast size is growing. When that rate crosses threshold the Giant Fiber fires once — and the fly is airborne before you finish moving your hand.
Everything here comes from published work on Drosophila melanogaster.