What Do Flies Think About? by Ideas & Discoveries Magazine
(1) It seems unbelievable, but an insect’s brain is more brilliant than any supercomputer.That’s why researchers are studying flies and bees to understand their cognition. Food for thought . . .
(2) Though it may seem like a mundane question, there is serious science behind it: Why is a common housefly able to land on a ceiling? After all, the insect flies with its feet down when it’s below the ceiling, yet, in the blink of an eye, the fly is suddenly perched with feet upward. The explanation for the fly’s aerial feat is important because it can reveal a lot about what the insect’s brain is capable of: Regardless of how the fly manages the landing, its tiny brain (which consists of only 100,000 nerve cells) has to go into high gear to carry it out. For a long time, scientists believed the flies turn around in flight much like a fighter pilot performs loops. This would require them to first “visualize” a mental rotation—in other words, to plan the loop beforehand.
(3) It was only recently that researchers discovered how a fly actually lands on a ceiling. Using a high-speed camera, they discovered that flies don’t perform a loop after all. Instead, they stretch out their front legs over their head and toward the ceiling. As soon as the legs make contact with the ceiling, the fly swings its body around 180 degrees like a gymnast on a horizontal bar. Then it simply attaches itself to the ceiling with all its legs. This precision landing requires perfect coordination of all its muscles. The fly’s swinging motion also needs to be calculated, which means information shoots through its body in the space of milliseconds. Not even an autopilot system controlled by a high-tech computer could carry out such a maneuver.
(4) Bees are a favorite experimental creature for researchers because they are easy to breed and are considered the “Einsteins” of the insect world. These striped geniuses perform intellectual feats that cannot be taken for granted, even among mammals. Bees can count, distinguish between objects like humans and dogs, recognize complex shapes, learn things, navigate across great distances and remember their routes, and return to their hives and tell other bees exactly where the tastiest flowers are. Compare that with the difficulties humans can have when finding their way around an unfamiliar city without a map—not to mention having to describe to friends the route they took. “Brain size is not necessarily an indicator of intelligence,” says bee researcher Lars Chittka at Queen Mary, University of London. “Larger brains usually utilize the same circuits over and over again. This might make for more detailed thinking or remembering, but it doesn’t guarantee the thoughts or memories will be better.”
(5) Bees are also social insects that create complex colony systems and display a high degree of social behavior. The idea of life in a group is firmly rooted in their brains—which is what makes bees so interesting to brain researchers. We, too, are social creatures, after all, and scientists suspect that certain neuronal circuits have changed very little over the course of evolution. In other words, bee brains could provide us with information on nerve connections that will help us better understand our own human nature and how we think.
(6) Researchers already know that insects living in groups need to have more computing power in their head. This is illustrated by the fact that all social insects have a larger brain than their loner counterparts. A key factor in this discovery was a study conducted by biologists at a Smithsonian lab in Panama. The country is home to a bee species that contains some members that live alone and others that form groups. The biologists discovered that the loner bees also had a smaller brain. So it appears that a larger brain is a consequence of group living. The same phenomenon is even more pronounced among several species of locusts that begin life alone and later join up to form giant swarms: As soon as they get together, their brains begin to grow by one-third. It’s likely they need to possess greater thinking capacity in order to compete with rivals in the swarm. It’s also likely that flying and communicating in a swarm is more difficult than doing those things alone. The biologists still don’t know how locusts get their brains to grow. The explanation, should it be found, might be of interest to medical researchers looking into treatments for paralysis or strokes. In any case, the researchers have found substances in the locusts’ brain that are extremely effective at killing bacteria. These substances are not related to any known antibiotics, so they could possibly pave the way for new medications in the future.
(7) Such discoveries are definitely pointing scientists in a new direction. However, practically no insect brain researcher has gone as far as Atsushi Takashima at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. Takashima has inserted electrodes into the brains of male moths that he then uses as control units for a robot. Whenever the moth-machine hybrid catches the scent of a female moth, it begins to search for the source. “Chemical substances do not spread out uniformly in air,” Takashima explains. “So even though their concentrations increase as you get closer to their source, the effects of wind and air currents make an analysis extremely difficult. But thanks to evolution, insect brains have developed techniques to get around this problem.” Takashima’s research has significant applications: His goal is to create robots that can sniff out explosives or dangerous chemicals in the air and locate their source. One day a processor will control such robots, but for now, a moth’s brain is far superior to any supercomputer on the market.
(Question 2) Tge sentences in lines 7 though 11 of paragraph 3 develop a key concept of the article by…
A - demonstrating how carefully a fly must target its landing place
B - revealing the difficulty in conducting research on how fly’s land
C - illustrating the complexity of the process a fly’s brain must control
D - explaining how rapidly the fly’s landing occurs after it makes a loop