Subject:
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Re: An Idea for new Mindstorms - event potential?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Sun, 3 Jul 2005 16:16:14 GMT
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Original-From:
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Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net&NoSpam&>
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Viewed:
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1816 times
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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 -------------------------
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HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: An Idea for new Mindstorms - event potential?
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| (...) 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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