I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

We recently produced this map of the fly brain, a complete map with 140,000 neurons. That's all the neurons in the fly's head and over 50 million connections.

The fly brain is certainly different from the human brain, but doing so in the fly will pave the way to understand how wiring gives rise to, you know, thoughts and perceptions and actions or behaviors.

And that's really what we want to understand because it's the wiring of the brain. It's all

those connections that are really important for making us who we are. But also, when they go

awry, you know, when there are problems with disease or with aging, miswiring can leave to profound, you know, when there are problems with disease or with aging,

miswiring can leave to profound, you know, defects that we want to understand and treat.

That's Malamurthy.

She's one of the leaders of a large international collaboration of neuroscientists

called the Flywire Consortium.

Their work on mapping the brain of a fruit fly

was hailed as one of the major scientific achievements of 2024.

The fruit fly brain may be not much larger than a pinhead,

but it controls the behavior of a complex animal.

And if you think a fruit fly isn't very complex,

well, just listen in and your leaves drop on the elaborate back-and-forth conversation that a male fly has with a female when he's courting her.

And you'll find out how a fly is cunning makes them so hard to swat.

This is really interesting to me because your team has studied an animal brain that has given us

such insight into the human brain, and you're doing it with a fruit fly, which doesn't seem

to have enough stuff in it because it's so small.

How much is packed into a fruit fly's brain?

So we know from our connecto. Connecto means, you know, measuring all the neurons, all the connections

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