By Antonia Davison
Publication Date: 2026-09-22 00:00:00
It took years to build the most detailed map ever of an animal’s nervous system—and it took the internet about a day to test drive it in Minecraft.
The map in question is a connectome, which is a detailed wiring diagram of all the connections in an animal’s nervous system right down to the individual neurons and synapses. Released this month by Google Research and HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus with collaborators, this particular connectome charts the brain and nerve cord of a male fruit fly, mapping more than 166,000 neurons across nearly 11,700 distinct types. Researchers built it by imaging wafer-thin slices of the fly’s brain (which is about half the size of a tomato seed), then using AI models to stitch millions of 2D images into a single 3D reconstruction and help classify the neurons.
Naturally, the memes followed.
The Minecraft version came from a Georgia Tech grad student who wired the connectome’s simulated activity into an in-game character and let the…
