Brain state locks silent memories in a trained fly connectome
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: SUMMARY Complete connectomes now exist for insect nervous systems, but whether a fixed wiring diagram can learn, and what its memories consist of, is unknown. Here, we trained a spiking model of the whole male Drosophila central nervous system, 167,106 neurons with fixed wiring, to plan moves and to remember a visual cue. Spikes write the cue into neuronal adaptation, which holds it silently until the next input reads it out. Cells that hold the trace are enriched for transcripts of a calcium-activated potassium channel in fly cell atlases. The learned readout recalls the trace only in the brain state of learning: the same trace evokes a different response at another delay, and a disease-like loss of potassium current rewrites the trace and changes how it is read. Learning in the new state is spared. Memory failure can arise from a change of state rather than a loss of storage. HIGHLIGHTS A fixed whole-fly connectome learns to plan and to remember a visual cue The cue is held silently in neuronal adaptation and read out by the next input Recall works only in the brain state of learning, at writing and at reading A disease-like lesion rewrites the trace, while learning in the new state is spared IN BRIEF Wang et al. train a spiking model of the whole male fly nervous system to plan and to remember. It holds a visual cue silently in neuronal adaptation and recalls it only in the brain state of learning, so a disease-like lesion removes recall while new learning is spared.
Institutions: Affiliated Hospital of Guangdong Medical College Hospital, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore General Hospital, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Guangdong Medical College, Shanghai Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, Maastricht University, Sheng Jing Hospital
Language: English
Subfield: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224572054