Scientists just used A.I. to map a fruit fly's brain. Here's why it's a 'turning point in neuroscience'

The first connectome of an adult animal brain. (Credit: Courtesy of flywire.ai)

Imagine you need to find a room in an expansive, labyrinthine house. Each hallway branches into several smaller hallways, and at the end of each segmenting branch is a room. Worse yet, imagine you urgently need to fix a problem in the house’s architecture, and have to search through countless halls and rooms to first find the problem. What you’d need most is a map.

A brain is like the house in question. To be exact, a human brain has 86 billion branching neurons and is by far the most complex organ in the body. The seat of intelligence and all complex thought, the brain dictates a huge part of an organism’s health, relationships with its species, and individuality. And there hasn’t ever been a map of the neural pathways inside a brain for any adult animal until now—and it was made possible by A.I.