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A study in fruit flies led by researchers at NYU Langone Health has confirmed a long-standing suspicion about how the brain encodes short-term memories.

Unlike the human brain, which has tens of billions of neurons, the fly brain has fewer than 200,000. Despite its relative simplicity, though, the fruit fly brain bears a striking resemblance to its human counterpart, especially in terms of how it is organized and how the brain cells called neurons communicate with each other.

The fruit fly is a valuable model for neuroscientists because all the connections between the neurons—together called the "connectome"—have been fully mapped, meaning that researchers can directly study how different neuron types interact to cause certain behaviors.

"Our study shows how a neuronal circuit forms a short-term memory in response to a fly sensing an odor, enabling it to remember a direction and travel toward a smell it wants to remember," said study senior investigator Katherine Nagel, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. "Scientists have long assumed an arrangement like this powers working memory, but our experiments confirm this arrangement exists and show how it works in a specific context."

In the new study, published online Oct. 7 in the journal Nature , the researchers examined how neurons interact to encode information into working memory—more specifically, how neural interactions can be both stable (that is, capable of being maintained over a period of time) and quickly turned on or off.

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