Mind Mushrooms

For hundreds of years scientists have tried to map the human brain, figuring out which bits do what. While they’ve made great progress in tracking down the parts responsible for vision, movement and other tasks, we still know little about how our brains store and retrieve memories. To keep things simple, researchers have turned to the fruit fly, Drosophila. Although they’re hardly insect Einsteins, fruit flies can still remember a few things and even be trained to do easy tasks, storing this information in specialised nerve cells in an area of the brain called the mushroom body. These images show the fly brain (purple), with nerve cells wiring into the mushroom bodies highlighted with a fluorescent green molecule. Studying the activity of these cells as the flies learn reveals that memories are consolidated in several different parts of the brain at once, and also retrieved together at a later date.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Chu-Huai Yang and Meng-Fu Maxwell Shih, and colleagues
• Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences, College of Medicine, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, and Institute of Biotechnology, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, May 2016