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How a fly escapes the reflex trap

Nature Neuroscience volume 18, pages 1192–1194 (2015)Cite this article

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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.

Walking on two legs without falling over or flying through the air without stalling are formidable challenges. Engineers working on bipedal robots or on wing-propelled micro aerial vehicles know how hard it is to achieve stable locomotion under inherently instable conditions. In animals and humans, however, powerful stabilization reflexes turn sensory signals into corrective motor action, which makes walking and flying look easy. Such reflexes are fast, robust and continuously in operation without us even noticing. But what happens if we want to perform a voluntary movement? Clearly, we are not enslaved by our own reflexes. And yet, to change walking direction, the nervous system needs to modify our stabilization reflexes. Otherwise we would be forced back onto our original trajectory whenever we tried to perform a voluntary turn. Von Holst and Mittelstaedt1 introduced this problem 65 years ago, and now we are gathering support at the neural circuit level for the 'reafference principle' they proposed as a solution. Ground-breaking work by Kim et al.2, who applied a combination of electrophysiological and behavioral methods to tiny fruit flies, now provides evidence on how it is done. Whenever a fly intends to change its flight trajectory, identified neurons in the visuo-motor pathways temporarily change their electrical activity, essentially preventing stabilization reflexes from counteracting an intended turn.

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

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  1. Holger G. Krapp is in the Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, UK.,

    Holger G Krapp

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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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