Fly Brain Lab

A puzzle game played on a real fruit fly brain.

The 6,486 neurons and 242,120 synaptic connections inside this fly are not invented. They come from MaleCNS v1.0, the publicly released whole-brain connectome of an adult male Drosophila melanogaster (HHMI Janelia / Google Research, CC-BY 4.0).

HOW IT WORKS
Buzz lives on a rotting banana. It smells the fermentation, tastes sugar with its feet (fruit flies really do), grooms itself, and flies a lap now and then. When your finger comes close, one line called the escape neuron fires, and it bolts.

Open the lab and you can silence that line. Poke the fly again — it doesn't move. You just did what neuroscientists do for a living.

TEN PUZZLES
Each level gives you a goal and the real wiring diagram:
• Make it take five pokes without fleeing
• Keep it on the banana without a single bite
• Let it smell the food but never reach it — without touching smell
• Make it extend its proboscis in mid-air, touching no food at all
• Without poking it once, make it scare itself

Later levels forbid the obvious switch, so you have to find another way in. One level teaches something the connectome itself taught us: silencing LC4 alone only cuts the escape response by 40% — the signal arrives by more than one road.

WHAT YOU GET FREE
The whole brain viewer and the first three puzzles, forever. No ads. No subscription. No energy bar.

The one-time unlock adds the Stimulate verb — firing any pathway at will — and every puzzle from level 4 on.

Not a research tool. A toy built on real data.