SWATTERthe fly's brain decides when it jumps

What the fly's eye sees

The fly's brain, live

495 neurons from the connectome. Each dot is a neuron; a flash is a spike. looming detectorrelayspike
Giant fiber voltagethe jump fires when it crosses the dotted line right left swatter size
The layout is a diagram, not anatomy: right-leaning relays sit at the top, left-leaning at the bottom. The connections and the activity are the engine's own.

What its brain does

From the swatter appearing to the fly leaving takes only about 10 to 25 ms.
    What each eye sees
    1. The swatter in each eye. The pink patch is where the swatter covers that eye's view. The grey dots are the eye's lenses. This is geometry, not a neural response.
    2. The looming detectors. Each orange ring is one LPLC2 neuron, placed where it looks. Brighter means more voltage; white with a pink glow means it just spiked.
    3. The escape neurons. The bars fill as the detectors push them toward threshold. A pink bar means that neuron spiked, and the jump follows.

    Leaderboard

    Verified runs only. The server replays every swat.

    What is real here. The escape circuit is the connectome (MaleCNS v1.0) wired as a leaky integrate-and-fire network. The loom detector that feeds it is a model component we supplied, not something the fly's visual system was shown to do (see docs/validation.md). The model also fails to reproduce the published trend of takeoff mode with loom speed. The 3D fly is an illustration that plays back what the neurons decided, and it is drawn about 13 times life size.