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What would be the point of holding a soccer world championship if we couldn't distinguish the ball from its background? Simply unthinkable! But then again, wouldn't it be fantastic if your favourite team's striker could see the movements of the ball in slow motion! Unfortunately, this advantage only belongs to flies. The minute brains of these aeronautic acrobats process visual movements in only fractions of a second. Just how the brain of the fly manages to perceive motion with such speed and precision is predicted quite accurately by a mathematical model. However, even after 50 years of research, it remains a mystery as to how nerve cells are actually interconnected in the brain of the fly.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology are now the first to successfully establish the necessary technical conditions for decoding the underlying mechanisms of motion vision. The first analyses have already shown that a great deal more remains to be discovered (Nature Neuroscience July 11, 2010).

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