Tiny Backpacks Tap into Dragonflies’ Brains | National Geographic

so this room were in is this sort of
indoor flight arena we’ve built to study
how dragonflies forage and catch prey
basically what we’ve tried to do is
craft an environment that is
sufficiently complex that dragonflies
will actually sort of be happy living in
here they’ll think it’s a you know the
real world and they’ll Forge and catch
things way to do outside but simple
enough that we can actually measure what
they’re doing with very high
reproducibility without being subjected
to the sort of variability of
temperature and lighting and air and
climate outside these obviously are
beautiful insects and if you watch them
for a few minutes that’s sort of
hypnotic to see the incredible agility
with which they they behave but like
fruit flies and other insects their
brain has many fewer neurons than a
mammal so there’s fewer things to
measure on the other hand they’re very
large for an insect and so it’s possible
to load them up with sensors and
actually measure them while they’re
behaving and that’s very difficult to do
with a small insect so why are we trying
to record from neurons in these
dragonflies while they’re flying we’d
like to look at the individual nerve
cells these are the brain cells or
neurons as we call them and think about
how they steer the animals so a simple
example would be playing tennis where
you’re simultaneously doing two things
you’re looking at something moving
through the world say ball for example
and you’re predicting where it’s going
and you’re trying to steer your body to
intercept the ball at some the future
location
you have these really small components
for this backpack this tiny little
device and you have to hold these things
you have to manipulate these little tiny
circuit boards and antennae and
circuitry or what have you and you’re
actually pushing the limits of
engineering into a degree and actually
the materials themselves try to think of
a backpacking manufacturer that’s making
backpacks for mountain climbers a
climber is going up a hill he’s climbing
Mount Everest and he or she does not
want to feel the weight of this backpack
and that Reaganomics have to be just
right it’s the same thing with these
animals with these backpack systems were
actually splitting it down to the
milligrams they have to behave in a way
that you can actually get real
scientific results if the payload is too
heavy or it’s or it’s awkward for the
animal you obviously aren’t going to get
the recordings or the data that you’re
looking for you know what are the
applications of this I mean if you want
to repair an injured brain the best way
to do that is to understand how it
actually works right and ultimately I
think research like this that really
explains what these circuits do is gonna
be the future of how you want to use
that technology so how would you control
the neurons to actually do it let them
suit do something in a goal-directed
manner and move their own legs and so
the best way to think about I think
these types of projects is just
fundamental research into what the brain
is doing to solve complex behavioral
problems