Gus Lott is a systems engineer who spends his days inside the heads of flies and worms. He’s helping researchers build virtual reality environments to run cognitive experiments on bugs for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Their goal? To understand the purpose of every cell in a fly’s tiny noggin.

Wired: What is it that you do?

Gus Lott: I think of it as reverse robotics. We’re dealing with organisms that have evolved circuits and adaptive-learning algorithms—mostly worms, fruit flies, and rodents—and we’re trying to develop tools that reverse-engineer how these natural machines work. We’re trying to figure out how nature built its own algorithm.

Wired: How do these experiments work?

Gus Lott: In some cases, we tether a fruit fly—glue it to a stick—and let it run on a ball treadmill. In other cases, we put it in a kind of virtual wind tunnel—let it think it’s flying. Because the animal remains still, we can record images from its brain.

Wired: How?

Gus Lott: In the case of the treadmill, the fly is placed on top of a tiny ball about 5 mm across. The back of its head is glued to a platform, and the top of its head is cut open so its brain is exposed. The head opens up into a high-powered microscope, which can capture high-resolution images of fluorescing cells in the brain; the scope can also shine lasers to stimulate particular neurons and activate sensors that have been inserted into the fly’s brain.

Wired: You also project images in front of the fly, right?

Gus Lott: Yes, it sees a 270-degree visual panel on which researchers display relatively simple images to make the fly think it’s moving forward into the scene.

Wired: What’s the research yield of these projects?

Gus Lott: You might’ve seen what’s called the homunculus model of the brain—the hand, the foot, the tongue, the whole sensory cortex is mapped out on the brain’s surface. Our goal is to apply learning algorithms to the massive sets of data we’re getting from these experiments to model how the natural system of the brain works, all the way down at the cellular level.