Re: An Idea for new Mindstorms - event potential?
Steve Baker <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.hardware.lego.robotics |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
dan miller wrote: >> Don't be too hard on the fly's brain. A housefly has about a third ofa >> million neurons. > > I've been interested in estimates of insect (& arachnid) brain power for > some time, with neuron counts, up-to-date analysis of cognitive abilities, > etc. Human brain: 100,000,000,000 neurons. Bee brain: 1,000,000 neurons. Housefly: 300,000 neurons. Fruitfly: 400 neurons. Nematode: 100 neurons. Sea slug 7 neurons. The housefly is actually suprisingly smart for the insect world. I found somewhere that spiders (in general?) have 'a few thousand' neurons. However, it's not just the NUMBER of neurons that matter. Their speed - and ESPECIALLY their interconnectedness seems to matter a lot too. > For some reason I've found this material hard to find online. Any > references would be greatly appreciated - dan Just type 'house fly neurons' into Google. There were 4,500 hits - and at least the first hundred or so seem authoritative. The most approachable paper I found (with about 1 minute of looking) was "Come fly with me" here: http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/LXVI3/fly.html This happens to be a very interesting article about how flies fly - the algorithms it uses and how it works mechanically. It said: "...we have been able to show that the animal’s visual system triggers each turn. Insects have quite sophisticated visual systems, and approximately two-thirds of their brain (about 200,000 neurons) is dedicated specifically to processing visual information. So if 2/3rds of the housefly's brain is 200,000 neurons, it must have 300,000 total. I saw that number in one of the other papers too - but it wasn't interesting enough to bookmark. ---------------------------- Steve Baker ------------------------- HomeEmail: <[email protected]> WorkEmail: <[email protected]> HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org Projects : http://plib.sf.net http://tuxaqfh.sf.net http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- GCS d-- s:+ a+ C++++$ UL+++$ P--- L++++$ E--- W+++ N o+ K? w--- !O M- V-- PS++ PE- Y-- PGP-- t+ 5 X R+++ tv b++ DI++ D G+ e++ h--(-) r+++ y++++ -----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----