Fruit fly study reveals how neural gates switch on short-term memory

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Add to Preferred Sources Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A study in fruit flies led by researchers at NYU Langone Health has confirmed a long-standing suspicion about how the brain encodes short-term memories.

Unlike the human brain, which has tens of billions of neurons, the fly brain has fewer than 200,000. Despite its relative simplicity, though, the fruit fly brain bears a striking resemblance to its human counterpart, especially in terms of how it is organized and how the brain cells called neurons communicate with each other.

The fruit fly is a valuable model for neuroscientists because all the connections between the neurons—together called the " connectome "—have been fully mapped, meaning that researchers can directly study how different neuron types interact to cause certain behaviors.