Scientists just uploaded a living creatures brain into a computer and let it control a body

Greg Isenberg@gregisenberg · 151K followers · 19 days ago

Scientists just uploaded a living creatures brain into a computer and let it control a body The creature is a fruit fly A company called Eon Systems took a complete map of its brain roughly 140000 neurons and 50 million connections and ran it as software Then they plugged it into a physically simulated fly body built from an X-ray scan of a real one And here’s whats wild The digital fly does things nobody programmed it to do It tastes sugar and moves toward it it grooms virtual dust off itself it reacts to what it sees Sensory input goes in the brain wiring fires the body moves all from the connectome alone with no hand-tuning Now here’s where Id pump the brakes This isnt a conscious fly living in the matrix The neuron models are simplified it has no hunger or real internal states and it only does a handful of behaviors Serious researchers are careful about how far they push the claims But the direction is the story Eon already said the next target is a mouse brain 560 times bigger and after that eventually a human one The line between a brain and a file it runs on just got a little thinner