decisions that you’ve made today we make
so many decisions every day of our lives
from what we should be wearing to how we
should be acting to even where we should
go
I suppose the very first decision you
might have made this morning is to get
out of bed and the very last decision
that you made I’m hoping is to start
listening to me when we make thousands
of decisions even the path that you took
to get you where you’re standing or
sitting right now is a decision and a
series of decisions that you made now
what if you’re an insect insects also
have to make decisions in their lives
they also have to decide if when and how
to do things should they fly or should
they sit should they eat or should they
wait and where do they even go to find
food and just like us they also take
information from their external
environment such as the objects around
them the sights and the smells and the
colors and they take information from
inside of them such as if they’re hungry
or not and then they make a choice in
our food studies how insects make
decisions in nature why would anyone
even care what a fly is thinking well
you see insects are some of the very
first animals to have ever conquered the
land they are nearly half a billion
years old and they are incredibly
diverse if you add up all of the species
of insects on this planet today
it’s nearly e
the number of other life-forms put
together including microbes and plants
and even you and me they’re incredibly
diverse they have survived mass
extinctions and the fact of the matter
is we could not survive without them now
we often think of insects as pests they
carry disease they destroy our crops but
they’re also incredibly important for
our ecosystems they perform essential
ecosystem services such as pollination
and also reducing waste like these
termites do and each of these behaviors
both positive and negative are mediated
by the decisions that they’re making in
their environment so we’re interested in
studying those decisions not only to
understand them but to also understand
ourselves and how our own brains can
possibly make these choices every day
but the fact of the matter is is we
don’t even know how a tiny insect brain
that has only about a hundred thousand
neurons makes decisions so how can we
possibly understand our own minds when
we have 80 billion neurons so how do we
start understanding insects maybe we
should start by thinking about how we
understand each other this photograph
was taken by a wonderful photographer
who is actually that day taking pictures
of my daughter Grace but that particular
day I’d had a pretty awful day at work
everything had gone wrong I had had so
many mistakes and I was just really
feeling terrible and so my daughter
stopped she stopped the photo shoot and
she came up to me and she gave me what
I’m most needed at that particular
moment which was a warm embrace you see
grace was practicing one of the most
profound human emotions and that’s
empathy empathy is a very powerful but
also a very difficult emotion and it’s
often confused with sympathy
but whereas sympathy is when you feel
bad for someone or you feel good about
someone empathy is feeling along with
another human being it is sharing such a
deep connection with another person that
you shared their experiences as if they
were your own now
how can you possibly empathize with an
insect I mean you don’t have wings you
can’t fly you don’t have six legs you
can’t imagine what it’s like to be so
tiny and going through the world but you
can try to understand the experiences
they have in the world around them you
can try to understand the types of
decisions they make and relate those
decisions to the ones that you make as
well and we call this empathic science
to start practicing empathic science the
first thing we do is to go out to where
the insects live in nature and we watch
them we watch the kind of objects that
they’re interested in the sights and the
sounds and the tastes and the smells
that they experience and we look at the
decisions they make in those
environments but this is really only
part of the battle because this is
really only still sympathy were actually
just thinking about the animals we’re
not actually really experiencing their
world since it’s actually impossible to
experience an insects reality perhaps we
can share their experiences in a virtual
reality so our group is using virtual
reality technology as a way to
understand how insects make decisions
and experience those decisions in real
time as the insects are making them as a
way of trying to empathize with those
animals now the first thing you need to
do in order to build a world for an
insect as you need to understand their
point of view insects have a lot of the
same senses as we do they can see they
can smell with those green antennae up
there they can taste they can touch and
they can even detect vibrations around
them but you see they don’t experience
those fences in the same way that we
humans do
for example they have compound eyes they
have hundreds to thousands of eyes
whereas we have only two and this
produces at least two main effects first
it means that each individual eye is
very tiny and that means that they can’t
resolve stationary objects very clearly
they become quite blurry however once
those objects move or if the insect
moves then they can see very clearly and
very very quickly as you’ve ever
experienced if you try to swat a fly or
mosquito they see you coming pretty
quickly so they have excellent eyesight
but it also means that from a distance
they may have to use a different kind of
sense humans if you’re looking for a
ripe fruit you probably see the fruit
first you maybe go and pick it up and
squeeze it to see if it’s right and
maybe smell it as well but insects
likely smell their world long before
they actually see it the sense of smell
for insects is very powerful and allows
them to track objects from long
distances and decide whether they want
to go to them or not and odors travel
through the air as little packets of
whatever they’re smelling when you smell
something or when an insect smells
something they’re actually smelling tiny
pieces of whatever it is that they’re
detecting from a mango to a glass of
wine and this is a pretty disgusting
thought I imagine if you think about
some of the things you’ve probably
already smelled today so these particles
actually evaporate from the objects and
they travel through the air in little
packets into the moving Airstream like
the wind and they travel much like smoke
does and the insect can detect the
direction of the wind and attack those
little packets and then follow it to
find the object which is then seized and
fits on and taste so now that we
understand a little bit more about an
insects point of view we then need to
build the world which means we need an
architect so enter if Colin Colin he
please stand up and say hello
how FAR’s a graduate student in our lab
and I gave Pavan a nearly impossible
task I told him to build a world for an
insect
and that’s exactly what Pavan has done
so here’s pollens insect world the most
important part of the world of course is
the insect and it’s here it’s the
tethered fly tethered means it’s put on
a little leash its house in place this
doesn’t hurt the fly but it does keep it
from flying away which is important
because we need to see what it’s doing
so we keep it in place much like we
would be on the treadmill we have a
high-speed camera which is able to film
the behavior of the fly and we have a
panoramic display now be fine seeing
very quickly
insects can also literally see in the
back of their head which means the world
that we build has to wrap all the way
around them unlike humans which when we
CVR we usually have just goggles in
front of our face and that’s enough the
insects have to have their world all the
way around them we have a directional
airflow a wind and that’s important
because it’s needed to carry the odors
that travel at high frequencies towards
the antenna of the insect and give it a
sense of smell and a sense of airflow so
now we put all of these different things
in the world together and we allow the
insect to make decisions and this is
what it looks like when they’re making
decisions here you can see the world
that this insect is making decisions
about it’s deciding about two trees and
the world looks kind of distorted and
that’s because in reality it’s wrapped
from 360 degrees and this is what it
looks like if you unwrapped it so just
like a map of the world often looks
distorted so does our world if it’s
unwrapped on the right side you’ll see
the trajectory that the insect would be
taking if we’re actually flying through
the world and then you can see the fly
and it’s wings are very blurry because
it’s actually flying at this moment and
how we know the designs of decisions
that it wants to make is by how it moves
its way
so much like if you’re in a rowboat if
you want to go to the left you paddle
paddle paddle on your right you want to
go to the right you paddle paddle paddle
on your left and the fly does the same
thing it changes the amplitude of its
wind beats and by measuring those we can
tell in which direction it wants to fly
so here you can see this fly making the
decision to fly to this apple tree which
is a good thing because it’s an apple
apple fly so it should like apple trees
and it’s going in and around the
branches and the leaves of those trees
and when it’s about to hit one of those
branches it actually throws up its legs
because it wants to land but of course
there’s actually nothing really there to
land on and that’s how we know that it’s
actually experiencing a virtual reality
so now we are using this technology to
try to understand how these organisms
make decisions in the natural world by
recreating it in a virtual world and we
try to see through their eyes and smell
through their antennae how they’re
making decisions every day of their
lives and we feel that this is very
important not only for us to understand
how any human brain could make decisions
but for a much more important reason so
often in today’s digital and urban world
we forget how connected we actually are
with the nature around us we forget how
important the animals around us are for
the food we eat the water we drink in
the very land we live on so I hope that
when you leave me today lets you go
outside go outside and find an insect
and bend down and you look that little
creature straight in the eyes that
beautiful little animal and you think
about all of the decisions that it made
to get where it is and then think about
your own decisions and think about how
related those two are and empathize with
that animal and then realize that those
decisions together actually dictating
the very future of this planet because
in the end our two worlds are exactly
the same
thank you very much [Applause]