The mushroom body (MB) is the fly’s learning and memory center — a microcircuit of ~6,300 neurons that transforms dense olfactory input into sparse, associative representations. It is the first circuit explored end-to-end in BRAVLi, and the subject of a research manuscript.

Lessons Covered

Lesson 05 — Explore the Mushroom Body

Integration: complete factsheet and visualisation of the MB. Kenyon cells (KC), projection neurons (PN), dopaminergic neurons (DAN), and mushroom body output neurons (MBON) — populations, connectivity, and spatial arrangement.

Lesson 13 — Mushroom Body Microcircuit

Does sparse coding emerge from wiring alone? The MB is extracted from the whole-brain connectome and simulated in isolation. The key metric: 5–10% of Kenyon cells active for any given odour (observed experimentally). Can the connectome-derived circuit reproduce this without plasticity?

Lesson 14 — ISN Regime and Olfactory Learning

Two questions: (1) Is the MB in the inhibition-stabilised network (ISN) regime? Test: paradoxical response to inhibitory perturbation. (2) Can three-factor STDP (pre × post × dopamine) produce single-trial olfactory conditioning?

Manuscript: Network Dynamics of the Drosophila Mushroom Body — regime classification, neuromodulation, stochasticity, and model invariance.

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