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"This fly is being put through its paces in a lab at Stanford University. It's watching moving objects on a tiny panoramic screen as it walks on a treadmill. Researchers at the lab are recording its movements to gauge how it perceives motion.               In another lab, a volunteer is watching the same images. His brain activity is also being recorded.               Thomas Clandinin, an associate professor of neurobiology, says that even though human and flies are at opposite ends of the evolutionary scale - when it comes to perceiving motion, the similarities are surprising.               (SOUNDBITE) (English) THOMAS CLANDININ, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF NEUROBIOLOGY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, SAYING:               \"The basic building blocks for how the circuits in the fly's brain work are really shockingly similar to the brains of humans and the brains of other vertebrae models that people have studied. So the basic algorithms that the brain uses to do very fundamental things in vision seem to be very similar.\"               And Clandinin says that's important\u2026 because it allows him to search for clues to human brain function on a much smaller scale. A fly's brain is made up of just one hundred thousand neurons as opposed to a human brain which is comprised of more than 100 billion.               Clandinin says the tricky part was coming up with a method to accurately record the fly's brain activity - that's where the treadmill comes in.               (SOUNDBITE) (English) THOMAS CLANDININ, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF NEUROBIOLOGY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, SAYING:               \"What we do is ask them to move their feet. And essentially we put them on a little treadmill and they are going to move the treadmill themselves and by moving the treadmill they tell us what they saw and we can measure the relationship between what they see and what they do by this kind of automatic report.\"               The scientists are now trying to learn how the brains of humans and flies evolved to compute motion in the same way.               (SOUNDBITE) (English) THOMAS CLANDININ, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF NEUROBIOLOGY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, SAYING:               \"I think all of this is connected to the larger goal of understanding our brains work both in healthy people and people with psychiatric and neurological diseases. There are a lot of psychiatric and neurological disorders that afflict many of us where our existing treatment strategies are incredibly poor. And in order to make them better there is a broad belief and a strong belief that I hold is that we need to know how the brain works in more detail in order to make a rational design for these kinds of therapeutic strategies.\"               To do that Clandinin says he and his team must first try to identify the neural networks flies use to solve problems produced by motion. He says the ability to map the human brain is many years into the future but for now, the humble fly is giving them a running start."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.reuters.com/video/2014/02/26/reuters-tv-fly-brains-provide-clues-to-human-motion?videoId=283870717&videoChannel=118065>