Flies "think" before making difficult decisions.

[MountainsWinAgain]

Flies fascinated me as far as I can remember I most appreciate their strength to annoy people with almost no effort at all, and now I finally know why they rub their hands together like they're up to no good.

-Like humans, fruit flies think before they act. The process involves coordinating a small group of about 200 neurons and a protein called FoxP.

-The FoxP gene is active for about 200 neurons (out of 200,000 in the fly brain). “Before a decision is made, brain circuits collect information like a bucket collects water. Once the accumulated information has risen to a certain level, the decision is triggered,” study author Shamik DasGupta of Oxford explains. “When FoxP is defective, either the flow of information into the bucket is reduced to a trickle, or the bucket has sprung a leak.” They become indecisive.

-According to previous models of human decision-making, when presented with clear evidence, we make decisions speedily; likewise, a lack of evidence prolongs the process, since you need to gather up information first. “Freedom of action from automatic impulses is considered a hallmark of cognition or intelligence,” Oxford’s Gero Miesenböck says in a news release. “Fruit flies have a surprising mental capacity that has previously been unrecognized.”

-When the team looked for single gene defects that made flies indecisive for difficult decisions, they found that FoxP -- a protein that helps regulate development -- was involved in the timing and accuracy of decision-making processes in the fly brain. Mutations in the gene that codes for FoxP caused information to take longer to accumulate before the fly could reach a decision: ​Compared with normal flies, these mutant flies took longer to decide when odors were harder to distinguish.

FoxP influences the speed and accuracy of a perceptual decision in Drosophila

Flies deliberate difficult decisions