A Fruit Fly Circuit as a Speech Emotion Reservoir

We taught a fruit fly to hear human emotion uses a 499-neuron circuit from the male fruit fly brain and central nervous system, mapped by FlyEM at Janelia with Cambridge, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Google Research.

The circuit is fully connected: every neuron can reach every other neuron through a directed path, across 15,865 connections built from 867,344 synaptic contacts.

The team wired this circuit into a speech emotion classifier using reservoir computing and an identify human emotion like happy, angry from voice inputs.