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Neurobiology

Cognition by a mini brain

Nature volume 400, pages 718–719 (1999)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 21 October 1999

We often expect little from small brains and cognitive miracles from big ones. But all brains were once small, in both evolution and development, reaching their respective levels of cognitive function only gradually. Elementary forms of cognition might, then, be present in small brains, and these could tell us what is really gained when brains become bigger. For example, the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster (the geneticist's delight and the neurophysiologist's torment) has a particularly small brain. Very little is expected of this tiny brain, and, indeed, few impressive behavioural capacities have been found so far — a range of innate response patterns, some artistic sexual foreplay, and rather limited forms of learning1,2. But new discoveries bring exciting prospects, using both molecular genetics and behavioural studies to analyse the fruitfly's elementary cognitive functions.

On page 753 of this issue, Liu et al.3 report their results on visual learning by Drosophila and its underlying neuronal substrate. They show that individual flies can do quite complex tasks. The authors first conditioned flies to associate visual patterns (the ‘conditioned’ stimulus) with the presence or absence of heat (the ‘unconditioned’ stimulus). The idea is that the animals should fly towards the appropriate patterns to avoid dangerous levels of heat. Their behaviour is ‘operant’, because the flight course that they choose determines delivery of the heat. The experiments were done under particular illumination conditions, which form part of the general ‘context’ in which the associations are established.

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Figure 1: Mushroom bodies from the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster.

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  1. the Freie Universität Berlin, Königin-Luise-Strasse 28/30, D-14195, Berlin-Dahlem, Germany

    Randolf Menzel & Martin Giurfa

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  1. Randolf Menzel
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  2. Martin Giurfa
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Menzel, R., Giurfa, M. Cognition by a mini brain. Nature 400, 718–719 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/23371

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