Fruit Flies and the Uneasy Silence

“When the man who knows all about the fruit fly chromosomes finds himself sitting next to an authority on Beowulf, there may be an uneasy silence.”

—Brand Blanshard

I read an article about fruit flies. Fortunately there were no authorities about Beowulf around.

The article highlighted complexity of the brain and the importance of the connections within it.

The fruit fly brain is remarkably complex. The human brain is even more complex. It consists of 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion synaptic connections.

A single axon, with all its branches taken together, can target multiple parts of the brain and generate thousands of synaptic terminals. Think about an injury to that single axon and how it could affect mood, perception, reasoning, memory, etc.

Because the cells in the brain communicate with electrical or electrochemical signals it’s hard not to think about them like a circuit board.