A fly enters a virtual reality chamber, and insect science may never be the same

In a lab in central Pennsylvania, a tiny fly is suspended in a magnetic field inside a dome lined with rotating LED bulbs. The insect flaps its wings and spins, believing it’s actually buzzing through this virtual reality environment—one that can even distort what the fly sees. The contraption may seem like the work of mad scientists —and indeed, it wouldn’t be out of place among other recent setups that let fruit flies ride on a carousel or spun locusts in a centrifuge . But like those experiments, this tiny virtual reality (VR) flight simulator has a deeper purpose. Here, researchers are probing the inner workings of the insect brain. The study, published this month in Current Biology , reopens a “long-standing question” about how humans and other animals navigate constantly moving environments , says Noah Cowan, a neuromechanics researcher at Johns Hopkins University who wasn’t involved with the work. The research, he adds, can “reveal deep insights into neuroscience.” To get around in a constantly moving environment, humans and fruit flies ( Drosophila melanogaster ) both rely on an innate behavior called the optomotor response, which allows us to stabilize our gaze in response to motion. When you turn the handlebars of a bicycle, for example, the front wheel twists—causing the visual world to sweep past your eyes in the opposite direction–yet you’re able to easily ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news