Translator: Suyeon Ji Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'd like to start by having everyone close their eyes
and think about all the decisions that you've made so far today.
Now, I suppose the first decision you must have made is to get out of bed,
and I'm hoping that the last decision you've made is to start listening to me.
Please open your eyes.
We're constantly making decisions,
even the path that you took to get to where you are at this very moment
was an entire series of decisions:
if you should move, when you should move,
even how you should move.
Now, what if you're a fly?
Insects also have to make decisions
about if, when, and how they should do things.
Should they fly or should they walk?
Should they eat, should they wait?
And where should they go to find their food?
And just like us, insects have to take information from the world around them
as well as internal information - hunger, thirst, hot, and cold -
and then decide.
Why should we even care about the decisions of a tiny fly?
It seems so inconsequential to our lives.
In fact, insects are some of the very first animals to emerge on this planet.
They are nearly half a billion years old.
If you add up all the species of insects that exist on this planet today,
it is nearly equal to all other forms of life put together,
all species of bacteria, fungi - even you and me.
While we often think of insects as pests that bring disease or destroy our crops,
they also serve incredibly important ecosystem services,
such as pollination and reducing waste, like these termite mounds do.
They have survived mass extinctions, and we cannot survive without them.
And I believe that understanding the decisions that these tiny animals make
is not only essential for the future of this planet
but can also teach us about ourselves and our own decision making.
And that is important for treating neurological disorders,
improving education, predicting financial trends,
even generating artificial intelligence.
But the fact of the matter is
we don’t even know how the tiny brain of an insect,
with only 100,000 neurons,
makes decisions.
So how can we possibly comprehend the human mind,
when we have 80 billion neurons.
To start, maybe we should think about the decisions themselves.
We humans understand each other's decisions
by making a connection with each other through an emotion called empathy.
Now, this photograph was taken after I'd had a very horrible day at work.
And I'm sure you've all had days liked these,
and I'm sure you all know what you feel like at the end of those days.
And my then five-year-old daughter, Grace, noticed how I was feeling,
and she came up to me, and she gave me what I most needed at that very moment,
which was a warm embrace.
See, Grace was practicing empathy.
It's perhaps the most profound of human emotions,
and it's often confused with sympathy.
But sympathy is when you feel bad for someone,
or you're thinking about another person, but empathy is very different.
It's feeling along with another individual.
It's connecting with them on such a deep level
that you share their experiences as if they were your own.
Now how can you possibly empathize with a fly, to understand their decisions.
You can't talk to them,
and they're too small and too quick for you to follow them around
and observe their decisions as they make them.
You simply can't put yourself into their world.
Perhaps, instead, you can put them into our world,
into a world that we create just for them,
so we can give them choices
and observe the decisions that they make in real time,
exactly as they make those decisions.
But now, if you're going to build a world for a fly,
you'd better have an architect.
Pavan, could you please say hello?
Pavan Cowshick: Hello.
Shannon Olsson: This is Pavan Cowshick.
(Applause)
He's a graduate student in the lab,
and when Pavan joined the lab three years ago,
I asked him to do nearly the impossible -
I asked him to build a universe for an insect.
And that's exactly what Pavan has done.
So here's the world that we’ve created for a fly.
It's an artificial world, so it’s a virtual reality arena.
And the most important part of this arena is, of course, the fly itself,
which you see here right in the middle.
And it can fly, and it can move its legs,
but it's held in place so it doesn’t fly out of the world.
We have a camera that can film the fly’s behaviors as it moves,
and we have a panoramic display.
Many insects have very large eyes
so they can literally see in the back of their heads.
So our display also has to wrap around the insect in 360 degrees.
The last two components are actually what sets our arena apart
from virtual reality that you might have for humans or for other animals.
And that's that we give our fly both a wind direction and also an odor.
In the real world, when insects are flying to objects at a distance,
it often can't see them.
So it uses its sense of smell to locate plants or fruits or flowers
or whatever are the objects of its affection.
This is not unlike if you've ever lost your cell phone,
and you call it up,
and you follow the ring tone until you can locate where that phone is.
Insects do a similar thing, but instead of using sound, they use smell.
And the wind direction is actually what tells them
where the smell is coming from and where they can locate the object.
So this is, right here -
I will show you - part of the arena.
And you can see how tiny it actually is.
And that's because it's actually made for a fly and not for us.
And I'm going to show you also a fly.
So, this fly is balancing on a ball right now.
Now you can see that it's flying.
If you zoom in on it - there you go.
This fly is actually flying in this world, but in this world -
there you go again.
In this world, it's actually looking at me right now.
And it's not getting any wind and odor
other than what it's getting from the air around it.
In the real world, when this insect is flying around and making its decisions,
it will move within the world when it makes its choices.
But I’m holding it in place, which means instead of the world moving
while the insect flies,
we have to move the world around the insect.
This is how we do it.
This is the cockpit of a virtual reality arena.
So this is what the visual part of our arena looks like.
You see two trees on it, and it looks a bit distorted
because, as I said, in reality it's wrapped in 360 degrees,
so this is what it looks like when it's unwrapped.
And you can see the fly down there at the bottom.
This is a still frame, so it's not yet moving.
When a fly wants to move left or right, it changes how it beats its wings.
If it wants to move left, it beats its wings very hard on its right.
If it wants to move right, it beats its wings hard on its left,
and that's how it turns.
So in our world, we pay attention to those wing beats,
and we turn the world in response to those wings,
so the fly is actually driving the world.
Now, in the video, you'll see, when we start on the right,
you'll see the trajectory that the fly would be making
if it were actually flying in this world.
So you can see this fly is making a choice to go to this tree.
This is an apple fly, and these are apple trees,
so it really likes them.
If you observe the trajectory on the right,
you'll see that it's gone to the tree,
and it's actually flying in and around the branches of the tree
and circling them.
And now we'll give it the same choice again,
and it will actually fly to the trees with apples.
And if you watch very closely,
you'll notice that as it gets very close to these objects,
very close to the leaves of the apples,
it actually will throw its legs out.
And in the real world, it does this for two reasons:
either it's about to crash into something, or it wants to land on it.
And this is how we truly know that this fly is making decisions
because it actually is detecting these virtual objects as if they were real.
So we're using the power of this technology
as a way to present these animals with choices
and observe through their eyes,
through their antenna, and through their behavior
how they make decisions,
and how these tiny brains can make such complex choices in the world.
And we feel that this is extremely important,
not only for understanding decision making in general
but for a much bigger reason.
So often, in today's digital and urban world,
we forget our connection with nature.
We forget how important the plants and animals around us are
for the food we eat, the water we drink, and the very land that we live on.
So I hope that when you leave today, go home, go outside in your garden
or even inside your house and try to find an insect -
an ant, a grasshopper, maybe even a fly -
and try to watch it for a little bit,
and think about all the decisions
that it must have made to get to the exact place that you are right then.
And also realize that many of those decisions
are not all that different than the kind of decisions that you might make.
Because we're all connected on this planet.
And in the end,
our two worlds are exactly the same.
Thank you.
(Applause)