A fly is tethered under a microscope to allow measurement of its brain activity while it navigates in virtual reality. Video: Fisher et al, 2019.

They fixed a fly to a pin with glue and lowered it onto a Styrofoam ball floating frictionless on a column of air. Surrounded by a visual panorama, the fly moved its legs to walk and turn, causing the ball to rotate and giving precise measurements of the fly’s movements. An imaging technique known as two-photon microscopy allowed the researchers to visualize the activity of individual neurons in the fly’s brain as it navigated in virtual reality.

Flies were presented with a visual cue—an unapproachable bright point of light that served to represent the sun, which insects use for long-distance navigation.

Initially, flies would try to approach the virtual sun. After some time, they would walk in a straight line at a fixed angle to the sun; and if the light moved, the flies made a compensatory turn to return to that fixed angle, demonstrating that they were paying attention to the virtual object and using it for course control.

When the team looked in the fly brain, they found that the activity of compass neurons was being influenced by visual system-associated neurons, known as R neurons. Specifically, R neurons were inhibiting compass neuron activity in a spatially specific manner, thereby reorienting the compass.

“Basically, visual system inputs seem to push the compass needle, so to speak, to the part of the compass that isn’t being inhibited,” Wilson said. “This will push the compass away from the wrong direction toward the right direction.”

Plastic memory

After the flies were acclimated, the researchers presented them with a second virtual sun, directly opposite of the first. This caused the activity of compass neurons to occasionally flip around 180 degrees.

When the second sun was removed, compass activity was variable—sometimes it would settle down into its original heading, sometimes the opposite, and sometimes, it would continue to swing around back and forth.

The top panel shows a group of compass neurons whose activity tracks the fly's heading direction while the fly walks in virtual reality. Below, the red dot's position shows the heading direction (angle) that the compass neurons are signaling, while the blue arrow shows the direction that the fly was heading in virtual reality. Image: Fisher et al, 2019.

“It’s as if the fly became confused or was changing its mind about what direction it was pointed in,” Wilson said.

The researchers found that this process depended on the interaction of compass neurons and R neurons, specifically the strength of inhibitory activity at the synapses, or points of connection, between them. Inputs from the visual system can reshape the function of those connections over the timespan of a few minutes.

Thus, a visual cue can interact with the representation of direction contained within compass neurons and alter their activity to remodel the compass, ultimately changing the fly’s sense of direction.

“The exciting thing for us is that the pattern of inhibitory inputs from visual neurons onto compass neurons is plastic,” Wilson said. “We can reorganize that functional pattern by just giving the fly an altered experience in virtual reality.”

This is likely relatable to mammals and other organisms, she added. “When navigating in a new environment, it often feels like it takes a few minutes to build up a mental map of the neighborhood or park or office you walked into. That’s the timescale in which these changes in synapse strength are occurring.”

Their findings now provide a mechanistic explanation for how visual experiences can directly alter the activity of direction-sensing neurons to change how the brain maps its internal representation of the world.

A better understanding of this process also sheds light on a form of short-term learning known as unsupervised learning, in which the brain aims to be as consistent with itself and its environment as possible, without the influence of reward or punishment.

“Short-term memory is encoded in the ring. If you turn off the lights, it retains a memory of the direction its headed,” Wilson said. “You can watch that memory evolve as the fly tracks the turns it makes and integrates those movements over time to update the compass. You can also watch that memory slowly become more inaccurate over time.”

“When you turn the lights back on, the compass clicks back into the right answer. We’ve all had that experience, I think, where you can catch sight of a visual landmark and feel the compass in your brain sort of rotate, and then you just see the world differently,” she continued. “We can watch those dynamics here in the fly brain, in real time.”

The work was supported by the HMS Neurobiology Imaging Facility (grant P30 NS072030), the National Institutes of Health (grants U19NS104655, F30DC017698, T32GM007753), and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Hanna H. Gray Fellowship. Rachel Wilson is an HHMI Investigator.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1772-4

Image: Getty Images