Summary

We have [relatively] recently scanned the whole fruit fly brain, simulated it, confirmed it is pretty highly constrained by morphology alone. Other groups have been working on optical techniques and genetic work to make the scanning process faster and simulations more accurate.

Fruit Flies When You’re Having Fun

The Seung Lab famously mapped the fruit fly connectome using serial section electron microscopy. What is underappreciated is that another group used this information to create a whole brain emulation of the fruit fly. Now, it used leaky integrate and fire neurons and did not model the body of the fly, but it is still a huge technical achievement. The first author has gone off to work at Eon Systems, which is very explicitly aimed at human whole brain emulation.

They did some cool things in the simulation. One is that they shuffled the synaptic weights to see how much that changed the neural activity. Turns out, quite a bit. This is a good thing because it means they’re probably right about how synaptic weight manifests in morphology.

Although modelling using the correct connectome results in robust activation of MN9 in 100% of simulations when sugar-sensing neurons are activated at [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Summary

(00:30) Fruit Flies When You're Having Fun

(02:02) Connectome Tracing Now And The Near Future

(04:16) Multimodal Data Analysis

(07:41) E11 Bio

(10:25) What I Would Work On

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
January 25th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DGsBfcEQKuNPmQizQ/notable-progress-has-been-made-in-whole-brain-emulation

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Notable Progress Has Been Made in Whole Brain Emulation” by Dom Polsinelli

LessWrong (30+ Karma)