COLD
SPRING HARBOR, N.Y., May 22, 2024
/PRNewswire/ -- We've been told, "The eyes are the window to the
soul." Well, windows work two ways. Our eyes are also our windows
to the world. What we see and how we see it help determine how we
move through the world. In other words, our vision helps guide our
actions, including social behaviors. Now, a young Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientist has uncovered a major clue into
how this works. He did it by building a special AI model of the
common fruit fly brain.
CSHL Assistant Professor Benjamin
Cowley and his team honed their AI model through a
technique they developed called "knockout training." First, they
recorded a male fruit fly's courtship behavior—chasing and singing
to a female. Next, they genetically silenced specific types of
visual neurons in the male fly and trained their AI to detect any
changes in behavior. By repeating this process with many different
visual neuron types, they were able to get the AI to accurately
predict how the real fruit fly would act in response to any sight
of the female.
"We can actually predict neural activity computationally and ask
how specific neurons contribute to behavior," Cowley says. "This is
something we couldn't do before."
With their new AI, Cowley's team discovered that the fruit fly
brain uses a "population code" to process visual data. Instead of
one neuron type linking each visual feature to one action, as
previously assumed, many combinations of neurons were needed to
sculpt behavior. A chart of these neural pathways looks like an
incredibly complex subway map and will take years to decipher.
Still, it gets us where we need to go. It enables Cowley's AI to
predict how a real-life fruit fly will behave when presented with
visual stimuli.
Does this mean AI could someday predict human behavior? Not so
fast. Fruit fly brains contain about 100,000 neurons. The human
brain has almost 100 billion. Referring to the subway map, Cowley
says:
"This is what it's like for the fruit fly. You can imagine what
our visual system is like."
Still, Cowley hopes his AI model will someday help us decode the
computations underlying the human visual system. He says:
"This is going to be decades of work. But if we can figure this
out, we're ahead of the game. By learning [fly] computations, we
can build a better artificial visual system. More importantly,
we're going to understand disorders of the visual system in much
better detail."
How much better? You'll have to see it to believe it.
About Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has shaped
contemporary biomedical research and education with programs in
cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology. Home
to eight Nobel Prize winners, the private, not-for-profit
Laboratory employs 1,000 people including 600 scientists, students
and technicians. For more information, visit www.cshl.edu
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SOURCE Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory