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How a fly escapes the reflex trap

Reflexes help us maintain a default posture and direction of locomotion. But what if we deliberately want to move differently? In Drosophila, the brain modifies a visually driven stabilization reflex to enable voluntary movements.

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Figure 1: Efference copies enable voluntary body saccades in Drosophila.

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Correspondence to Holger G Krapp.

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Krapp, H. How a fly escapes the reflex trap. Nat Neurosci 18, 1192–1194 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4097

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