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Subject: 
Re: An Idea for new Mindstorms - event potential?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Sun, 3 Jul 2005 16:16:14 GMT
Original-From: 
Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.&StopSpammers&net>
Viewed: 
1808 times
  
dan miller wrote:
Don't be too hard on the fly's brain.  A housefly has about a third ofa
million neurons.

I've been interested in estimates of insect (& arachnid) brain power for
some time, with neuron counts, up-to-date analysis of cognitive abilities,
etc.

   Human brain:  100,000,000,000 neurons.
   Bee brain:          1,000,000 neurons.
   Housefly:             300,000 neurons.
   Fruitfly:                 400 neurons.
   Nematode:                 100 neurons.
   Sea slug                    7 neurons.

The housefly is actually suprisingly smart for the insect world.
I found somewhere that spiders (in general?) have 'a few thousand'
neurons.

However, it's not just the NUMBER of neurons that matter.  Their
speed - and ESPECIALLY their interconnectedness seems to matter
a lot too.

For some reason I've found this material hard to find online.  Any
references would be greatly appreciated - dan

Just type 'house fly neurons' into Google.  There were 4,500 hits - and at
least the first hundred or so seem authoritative.

The most approachable paper I found (with about 1 minute of looking) was
"Come fly with me" here:

http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/LXVI3/fly.html

This happens to be a very interesting article about how flies fly - the
algorithms it uses and how it works mechanically.  It said:

  "...we have been able to show that the animal’s visual system triggers each
   turn. Insects have quite sophisticated visual systems, and approximately
   two-thirds of their brain (about 200,000 neurons) is dedicated specifically
   to processing visual information.

So if 2/3rds of the housefly's brain is 200,000 neurons, it must have 300,000
total.   I saw that number in one of the other papers too - but it wasn't
interesting enough to bookmark.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net>    WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
            http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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Message is in Reply To:
  Re: An Idea for new Mindstorms - event potential?
 
(...) I've been interested in estimates of insect (& arachnid) brain power for some time, with neuron counts, up-to-date analysis of cognitive abilities, etc. For some reason I've found this material hard to find online. Any references would be (...) (19 years ago, 3-Jul-05, to lugnet.robotics)

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