Virtual Fly Brain Computer Model

Most people think about ways that they can get rid of insects. However, some scientists are actually considering what it would take to create artificial insects with virtual brain's. Researchers are now planning to create a computer simulation of a fly's brain (drosophila). Could this virtual fly brain enable military mad scientists to fine tune a bug's functioning? Perhaps you could recalibrate a bug's pleasure circuitry so it would find enjoyment in injecting deadly poison into enemy combatants. Or maybe this might allow the development of increasingly complex forms of insect behavior like swarming or intelligence gathering by precisely altering the bug's neural wetware (with the help of the model).

I've previously mentioned about some attempts to construct computer simulations of the human brain (see computer brain simulation and blue brain). A human brain model in silico is quite a monumental task to undertake and may not come to fruition for quite some time. I've also noted before about my skepticism in the ability to model consciousness without the physics of our world. The human brain contains about 10^12 brain cells, 10^15 synapses and an exceedingly diverse array of synaptic proteins. At the very least, all of these are likely important for the overall functioning of the mind. Comparatively, the fly nervous system only has about 100,000 neurons. So it's surprising that modeling a bug's brain wasn't an obvious first choice. It's just so much simpler to do than a human brain. I personally find it highly probable that all insects have a simplified form of consciousness.

For the virtual drosophila brain, the researchers are proposing that sensory inputs and outputs could be added into the model. These senses include basically everything that would be part of a bugs perceptual experience (tactile, auditory, visual, gustatory, olfactory, even magnetosensory). An insect likely has a unitary consciousness that coalesces all sensations into one overall perception with discrete qualia. A more voluminous brain can probably enable a more complex conscious awareness. So we can assume that simpler organisms likely have a less complicated representation of objective reality. Specific "objects" may appear much cruder and far different to a fly than they would to a human being. An insect's consciousness only has to represent reality enough to drive behavior in a specific way.

A major stumbling block to modeling an insect brain is being able to scan all the relevant brain cell configurations and synaptic connections. They could visualize aspects of brain functioning using electron microscopy. However this would generate 26 terabytes of information and would require a huge amount of man hours to prepare the material. Recently faster methods have been developed to procure and analyze the data. This may not remain a constraint forever in the future.

The researchers mention that there are about 2000 to 3000 genes linked to human inherited diseases that are conserved between a fly and human. So being able to better understand the mind of a this insect has implications for human brain disorders as well. However, there are also considerable differences between the two, such as the fact that drosophila brain cell axons are not myelinated. This lack of myelination means that neural signaling may happen less quickly than in mammalian brains. Also drosophila doesn't really have the same blood flow and cardiovascular system as mammalian brains do. So oxygen reaches the neurons in a fly in a completely different way (not through red blood cells).

The researchers conceptualize the model as being used to predict the subsequent behavioral fly output when a specific neuronal adjustment is undertaken. Like how would a fly act if scientists were to upregulate a single receptor protein in a key brain region by genetic engineering? In the past, researchers have been constantly modifying the genetic source code of drosophila. However, this virtual model could potentially exponentially increase the understanding of how neural changes encode for behavior. It might become much easier to remodel a bug's functioning to essentially do whatever a scientist wanted it to do. They would basically be using a control type theory for the virtual model that could continuously be adjusted in order to refine it. So the virtual model may not necessarily have to be conscious in order to successfully predict the behavioral output of any brain change.

If successful, a virtual bug model could allow the creation of increasingly bizarre insect minds that have never before been seen in nature. Better modeling and understanding of these simulations might allow scientists to fashion more computationally efficient insect brains, for instance. Maybe they could increase the amount of proteins in the synapses or add myelination to the neurons so as to overclock the fly's brain. They might be able to tell ahead of time the subsequent effect on behavior. Studying the nature of consciousness would also be a fascinating aspect to this. Could you create a bug that was blissed out and euphoric? Darwinian natural selection usually precludes these extreme states of well being, but that doesn't mean you can't engineer them in an insect. Just imagine all the unique modes of consciousness that are possible by tinkering with a bug's genetic code. Perhaps these models could go a long way in helping to understand consciousness in an objective fashion and how it relates to behavior.

Obviously this project could take quite some time, but I think it could potentially happen faster than making a human brain computer model. The first models would probably be simplified, but could increase in detail over time. The fact that researchers can genetically engineer and breed flies so quickly also means that it would be much easier to test out the model to see if it was predicting behavior. A lot of interesting things could become possible in the future as this field matures.