This article continues to blow my mind. Tuesday’s Science Times section reports that scientists are watching neuron level memories being created in fruit flies. The insects are taught to associate certain smells with a highly unpleasant electrical shock. The flies learn quickly to avoid things with that smell (how does this work with fruit flies, of all things, when so many other bugs will fly into a light bulb time and time again?).
Are fruit flies (with 200 neurons, apparently) smarter than we thought? Or, are homo sapiens (with 100 billion neurons) less uniquely intelligent that we think? Can the scientists make the bugs remember a trip to the Grand Canyon that they never took? Can memory be reduced to an incidence of learned associations?
Those last two questions probably aren’t fair at this early stage of the game, but I’m wondering what it is about this study that bugs me (pun not intended). Something seems to be amiss, but I, as an ignorant observer, can’t quite figure out what it is.
