Mushroom Bodies

A key question that neuroscience seeks to answer is how brain cells work together to help us interpret and interact with our ever-changing environment. Processes like these are easier to study in the less complex brains of small organisms. Mushroom bodies – dense arrangements of neuron fibres – in the insect and invertebrate brain help these organisms to learn and remember the smells, sights, and sounds that they encounter. Scientists have studied these structures to learn more about the circuits and processes that underly memory, for example how mushroom bodies help these organisms to remember certain places and relationships between different items. This image is of a crab mushroom body from recent research into how evolution may have shaped these structures differently in some species depending on their environmental demands. Studies like these on non-human brain anatomy reveal key pieces of information about the types of neural circuits that allow us to interact with our world.

Written by Gaëlle Coullon

Gaëlle Coullon

Writer

Gaëlle is a consultant and trainer in research communication and commercialisation. As an ex-neuroscientist, she is always looking for new ways to combine her love of writing with everything brain related.

• Image from work by Nicholas Strausfeld and Marcel E Sayre
• Department of Neuroscience, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, February 2021