For most of my life, I believed the brain was something uniquely special, it is an organ unlike any other. The kidney filters waste, the lungs extract oxygen, and the spleen guards against infection, but the brain? It wasn’t just a biological machine; it was a center of thought, memory, and identity. It felt singular, something that couldn't be broken down into parts and understood in the way we understood other organs.
That belief held firm.. until I joined a neuroscience lab as a junior intern.
One day, a labmate unveiled a project that would shatter my assumptions: a virtual fly. At first glance, it seemed like just another digital simulation, the kind researchers had been creating for years. But this one was different. It didn’t just mimic the fly's movements or behavior—it had a brain. A digital brain.
Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience had mapped the fly's neural network in unprecedented detail.
This wasn’t a rough approximation; it was an actual model of the fly’s neurons, trained on thousands of hours of behavioral data. The virtual fly could make decisions and behave like its real-world counterpart.
The moment I saw it in action, my worldview shifted.
I had always assumed the brain was a structure that would never be understood. Yet here was a model proving otherwise, at least on the scale of a fly. If we could do this now, what would be possible in the future?
That experience left me questioning everything I thought I knew about intelligence and what it means to be "alive."