Fruit Flies Are Smarter than They Appear
And we have more in common with them than you might think
Hiya!
So, I’ve been thinking; it seems as though we humans treat and measure consciousness a lot like we do intelligence. Estimating intelligence according to narrow definitions while ignoring anything outside the limited portrayal. When the truth is, intelligence is a broad spectrum — involving far more than memorization skills or the ability to take a standardized test.
Why wouldn’t it be the same for consciousness? Are the ways we measure and label consciousness in other animals narrow-minded? A couple of recent studies on fruit flies think so. According to them, consciousness and cognitive abilities are more dynamic than we assumed.
Fruit Flies Have Surprising Cognitive Abilities
In a recent study published by the journal Nature last month (February 2022), researchers found we have more in common with the seemingly insignificant fruit fly than just our love for fruit.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind (KIDM) concluded that fruit flies (Drosophila) possess cognitive abilities once thought to only exist, or at least have only been tested on, mammals. Specifically, fruit flies appear to have at least some conscious awareness, a working memory, and an attention span.
They learned this after using a multi-tiered approach in their studies, which is intriguing to read, but a bit complicated to explain. Let’s just say, it involved putting fruit flies in a virtual reality-type environment and conditioning them using heat. They also tracked and imaged brain cells of the fruit flies during real-time activity — The fact they could do this on an animal as small as fruit flies blows my mind. Gosh, science is cool.
Anyway, in the process, they noticed something interesting. Their visual memory faded faster when the fruit fly became distracted — such as by a gentle puff of air. This means that for the first time ever, researchers indicated that paying attention is a requirement for learning, even for fruit flies.
How does this relate to us? Well, it gives us a better idea of how attention works. If we can understand how attention work in fruitflies, perhaps we can find similar characteristics within mammals or even humans.
Understanding how consciousness works is much more convoluted than we think it is. Attention is just a tiny part of consciousness’s much broader puzzle, but it’s a decent starting point since something as tiny as a fruit fly possesses it.
Broadening the Scope of Consciousness
What’s deemed consciousness — to be conscious or have consciousness — is rigid and exclusive. For a long time, humans claimed that only humans are conscious beings, and everything else is less-than. It was even thought that all animals aside from humans weren’t intelligent or didn’t have souls.
Actually, for a while, white men considered white men as the only animals worthy of respectable consciousness. At the same time, women and people of color were considered practically no different than animals — but that’s a separate article.
The point is, today, we know that all humans and mammals have a consciousness. You are a conscious being, so am I, my dog Albert, your pets, the squirrels outside, and the birds in the trees. We’re all conscious beings with attention spans, capable of learning and becoming distracted.
This discovery with the fruit flies indicates that it’s not just mammals, but potentially all animals, including insects have cognitive abilities. I mean, we already know birds, and plenty of marine animals also have a consciousness, so why not insects, right?
Perspective Shift
We can go even further. If it’s true that all animals are conscious and possess cognitive abilities, could we apply it to all living things? At first thought, your instinct may be to say, “Umm… no. Because all animals at least have brains whereas other living things, like plants, do not. Considering the term ‘cognitive’ implies a brain then all living things cannot therefore have cognitive abilities.”
To which, I’d remind you, scientists once believed trees to be devoid of conscious life. They definitely weren’t considered conscious entities. Now, we know trees are actually exceptionally social, despite not having brains. Some scientists even say we should consider them sentient beings.
The more we expand our narrow definitions and look outside our egoist classifications and assumptions, we might find we have more in common with the rest of the natural world than we might think. As we learn more about the brains and minds of fruit flies, we learn about ourselves. After all, everything is connected, is it not?
Then again, if all living things or animals have cognitive abilities, where is the cut-off for gaining personhood? I’ll explore this question more on Monday in Curious Life.
Just as a reminder, you’re currently reading my free newsletter Curious Adventure. If you’re itching for more, you’ll probably enjoy my other newsletter, Curious Life, which you’ve already received sneak peeks of on Monday mornings.
Any payments go toward helping me pay my bills so I can continue doing what I love — ethically following my curiosities and sharing what I learn with you.
You can find more of my writing on Medium. If you’re not a member but want to be, click here to sign up! Doing so allows you to read mine and thousands of other indie writers to your heart’s content.
Lastly, if you enjoy my work and want to show me support, you can donate to my Ko-fi page, where you can also commission me to investigate a curiosity of your own! Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.
