- Reaction score
- 1,704
Anyone who has tried to swat a fly knows they can quickly spot – and evade – the approaching swatter. New research from a team of Stanford scientists might explain why: Flies and humans share a computational strategy to perceive motion.
"What's really exciting to me is that no one would have expected this deep similarity between two animals that are so evolutionarily different," said Stanford's Thomas Clandinin, an associate professor of neurobiology and one of the authors of the study, which was published this month in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The last common ancestor of flies and humans lived more than 500 million years ago when the planet looked quite different. Nonetheless, repeated patterns in the natural environment led ancestors of both organisms to evolve similar strategies to sense movement.
It is likely this model evolved twice – once in a human ancestor and once for a fly ancestor – because flies and humans are so far apart on the evolutionary tree, according to neurobiologist Damon Clark, a lead author of the paper. Despite the fact that the brains of humans and flies are quite different, they analyze motion in similar ways. Clark, now a professor at Yale, was a Stanford postdoctoral researcher in Clandinin's group at Stanford when he worked on the project.
Scientists know quite a bit about how the eye detects light. However, they don't completely understand how the brain translates a series of chemical signals into an image. The research team examined motion perception in flies and humans to learn more about the visual system and the brain's problem-solving strategies.
Read more here.
"What's really exciting to me is that no one would have expected this deep similarity between two animals that are so evolutionarily different," said Stanford's Thomas Clandinin, an associate professor of neurobiology and one of the authors of the study, which was published this month in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The last common ancestor of flies and humans lived more than 500 million years ago when the planet looked quite different. Nonetheless, repeated patterns in the natural environment led ancestors of both organisms to evolve similar strategies to sense movement.
It is likely this model evolved twice – once in a human ancestor and once for a fly ancestor – because flies and humans are so far apart on the evolutionary tree, according to neurobiologist Damon Clark, a lead author of the paper. Despite the fact that the brains of humans and flies are quite different, they analyze motion in similar ways. Clark, now a professor at Yale, was a Stanford postdoctoral researcher in Clandinin's group at Stanford when he worked on the project.
Scientists know quite a bit about how the eye detects light. However, they don't completely understand how the brain translates a series of chemical signals into an image. The research team examined motion perception in flies and humans to learn more about the visual system and the brain's problem-solving strategies.
Read more here.
