“Flies are important model systems…since their brains solve the same problems as we do,” said Mala Murthy at Princeton University in a press conference. Murthy co-led the project with Sebastian Seung, who has long championed mapping as a way to better understand the inner workings of our brains and potentially extract algorithms to power more flexible AI.
In one of nine articles on the project published by Nature, Clay Reid at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who was not involved in the project, called the release a “huge deal.”