That's wild!
Solitary wasps tend to be a little twitchier than social ones, but I've had this method work as well with both sorts. On the other hand, I understand wasps well enough not to be frightened of them and they seem to like me pretty well too, so I suppose I can't vouch for good results in all circumstances.
Its more about glass being transparent and all than intelligence I would imagine.
We put a fly into virtual reality. A fly.
Can we appreciate the fact that humanity has come to a point where dystopian shit like this has become the norm? Oh but of course we can! We do!
But should we really? I mean, come on. This is nuts. There's already farmers putting VR goggles onto cows. Because they give better milk. It's progress alright, but it's nuts.
Completely bonkers, if you ask my british personality fragment. It really isn't that far from putting VR onto everything and everyone simply because people have stopped appreciating actual reality, with actual nature.
A fly!
In virtual reality!
It's unironically amazing!
We're fucked. Seriously. lol
This research is being done to understand cognition. To connect to the biochemistry and biophysics. To improve our models and begin making bigger leaps.
Even simple systems like drosophila are wildly complicated.
A hundred years of this type of investigation and maybe one day we'll be able to record memories. Transfer consciousness. End death.
This isn't just "fly VR". This is the curiosity of being human. And yet another slow, methodical step towards solving it all.
If you want a dystopian take, why not this one instead? Climate change is bad enough already if you just assume the billions of nonhuman animals killed, displaced, and degraded by it are meat robots. How much worse to know instead that they are, consistent with their capabilities, no less learning, thinking, and feeling beings than we are?
Both in terms of the jaw-dropping technical setup (full VR rig AND real-time brain imaging for untethered flies), and the results (proof of otherwise unknowable cognitive abilities) with interesting philosophical implications about the differentiation we humans perform when categorizing animals (for example, is killing a fly morally different than killing a horse/cow?)
> more sophisticated cognitive abilities than previously known
No. More sophisticated cognitive abilities than previously modelled using atemporal neural nets.
Anyone who has spent an afternoon being outwitted by a fly in their study knows that even a common housefly can be cunning beyond belief. It's not just that their reaction times out-pace humans. They seem to remember, anticipate, plan and even deceive.
Those faculties seem inexplicable by a bottom-up network of 100,000 neurons using naive connectionist models we currently understand in artificial networks. That's because time is missing from the models. Biological networks are spiking, and (last I researched it) can operate at up to 1kHz, and using integration, differentiation and non-linear feedback can work like analogue computers (Hodgkin and Izhikevich models). Instead of sending simple activation thresholds around the network that's like sending network packets that can perform remote procedure calls.
And yes, they love bananas.
