The film
A real 8mm home movie from the Stockfilm archive, shot by somebody's family in 1954 to 1963. The fly flies over the picture, and the picture around it is what its eyes see.
TimeFly · a Stockfilm experiment
A fruit fly's brain is watching 1963.
Scientists mapped every neuron in a fruit fly's nervous system. TimeFly runs all 174,252 of them live in your browser, shows them a real home movie, and lets them fly. Every flash you see is a neuron firing.
- Neurons
- 174,252
- Connections
- 6,133,500
- Synapses
- 88,354,504
- Home movies
- 3
What the fly sees
Maryland, 1963Lights caught 0
The brain · 174,252 neurons
- Optic lobes
- Central brain
- Nerve cord
- Descending neurons
Press play. The film starts, the eyes read it, and the brain steers the fly.
Connectome-based simulation with modeled neural dynamics, senses, and controls. Not a living fly, consciousness, or a complete biological emulation. Films played: 0.
What you are looking at
The eyes
Each eye is drawn as its real optic-lobe columns, roughly 880 per side, straight from the wiring map. Warm flashes mean a spot just got brighter, cool ones mean it darkened. That is what a fly's eye actually sends inward: change, not brightness.
The brain
174,252 neurons and 6.1 million connections, wired exactly as measured in one male fruit fly. Blue is the optic lobes, gold the central brain, green the nerve cord. A neuron lights up the moment it fires.
The steering
Thirty-two descending neurons carry the turn command out of the brain. The fly turns toward whichever side is busier. Nobody wrote the path. Switch those neurons off and it flies dead straight.
Try this
- Tap the film to move the light. Real flies steer toward light, and so does this one, through 174,252 neurons and no shortcuts.
- Drag the brain to spin it. The two big blue lobes at the sides are the eyes' half of the brain. Watch the activity pour inward from them.
- Switch films. Each one is a different family's home movie, and the fly starts again from the left edge.
The honest bit
This is a simulation of a measured wiring diagram with a standard neuron model, running on your own device. It is not a living fly, and nobody knows what a fly would make of a home movie. What is real: the wiring, the eye columns, and the footage.
Wiring: MaleCNS v1.0, Janelia Research Campus, used under CC BY 4.0. Neuron dynamics after Shiu, Sterne and colleagues, Nature 2024. Footage: the Stockfilm archive of real home movies, 1930s to 1980s. An independent Stockfilm experiment; no endorsement by Janelia is implied.