Nature’s inspiration in understanding the brain

MORE than any other feature, it’s human intelligence that we hold in highest regard. Our brains are special. We’re the ones who painted the Mona Lisa and devised the Internet and are wondering how to colonise Mars. That bee that’s quietly pollinating your roses doesn’t hold a candle to us, right?

Over millions of years, different species have evolved in different ways that allow them to thrive. As a result, we can learn a lot by studying the brains of the amazing creatures that inhabit the world we live in. Understanding how other species solve real-world problems can help us design better technologies, like visually guided autonomous vehicles, satellites that can monitor pollution, or cancer-detecting cameras.

Crows have incredible memories for human faces and can perform a sequence of toolbased manipulations to get food. Bees can learn that pulling on a string leads to a food reward just by watching another bee do it. The C. elegans roundworm is a perfect model for studying spinal cord repair because unlike us, it is capable of regenerating its nerves. It has just 302 neurons that connect to each other, making the logic of its neural circuitry far more understandable than that of our own brains (which have approximately 100 billion neurons). Fruit flies have long been used for research because their genetic secrets are relatively easy to uncover, helping us work out the contribution of particular molecules to brain function. Studying the “simple” brain of the honey bee, with just one million neurons, has helped us understand nature’s efficient solution to airborne navigation, leading to improved robotic aircraft designs. Further, it is the astonishingly complex visual system and relatively simple brain of the mantis shrimp that is helping us design better satellite sensors, boost data storage in computers and detect cancers using polarised light. Science is only beginning to scratch the surface in studying, the many varying ways, how the brains of different organisms have developed. Humans, worms and flies don’t look very similar, but you might be surprised by how much their building blocks have in common. Humans and C. elegans worms share about of their genes with each other Humans and Drospohila fruit flies share about of their genes with each other