The Brain From The Bottom Up
What motivates us?
The brain is an incredible organ. Its tens of millions of neurons each connect to dozens of partners. This complex network holds our thoughts and our feelings and guides our actions. Within this network, distinct groups of neurons store memories, process information, or carry out specific functions. These groups of neurons are called “neural circuits.” In our lab, we ask: what unique combination of neural network connectivity and cellular biophysics allow each neural circuit to perform its specific function?
Our approach
Rather than start with the full complexity of the human brain, we instead use a far simpler model organism: the fruit fly. The central brain of the fruit fly has 100,000 neurons. These neurons orchestrate the fly’s behavior, guiding the animal as it navigates, allowing it to remember attractive and repulsive odors, coordinating courtship, and much more . A monumental effort recently mapped out the connectivity between the central brain neurons. We use these neural connectivity maps to generate hypotheses about how the structure of different neural circuits leads to their individual functions. We then test these hypotheses with the powerful set of genetic tools that are unique to the fruit fly. With these tools, we can monitor, excite, or inhibit the activity in almost any neuron in the fly brain.