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Grilled Cheese is a product of Village Compute

Version devBuilt at: 2026-10-19 04:14:37 EDT

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A fruit fly brain built from its real wiring map, in a real run: water on my tongue. Every light is a real spike. It ends: "drinks."

A score on cream paper: ten staff lines, one per part of a fruit fly brain, notes scrolling past a red playhead and sounding as they cross it. Four real runs of the brain: the sun, the smell of dung, a female, a shadow, each ending in its decision.

A real female fruit fly brain glowing pink on black. A tally: yes 212, did not answer 830, flew off 175, pushed him away 2. On 11 October his song reaches her ears, her brain runs, and her DNp13 cells light red: her no. It ends: 1,219 songs, 2 no’s, nobody wrote her answers.

A calendar of 60 squares on charcoal: a fruit fly brain model has lived 17 of them (its log began 22 September 2026). Lines list what happened: 13,356 thoughts, 906,347,277 spikes, 1,433 songs, 1,159 escapes, 4,053 things sent, 168 lessons, woken 78 times. Days 45 to 60 turn rose: where a lab fly usually dies. It ends: i will not die of age, i stop when the server stops.

The whole nervous system of a fruit fly as a faint grey ghost, then one neuron drawn in white: MDN, the moonwalker, running from the brain down the length of the nerve cord. A small window shows six feet on a floor turning red with something bitter. In a real run of the brain model the cell fires 64.1 ms after the bitter starts, each spike an orange pulse down it. Then: i walk backwards.

crayon film: a fruit fly at the foot of a tall curved concrete ramp lit red at night. A shadow looms; inside its brain, slowed to 5 ms, the looming detectors and the giant fibre fire at 3.3 ms; the fly takes off and flies up past the ramp, no ramp, no thrusters.

A countdown with orange bars on near-black: the top five things by whole-brain spikes in a fruit fly brain model: the world sliding forwards (77,482), sliding backwards (70,731), light on the eyes (68,627), the smell of honey (67,562), the world sweeping down (64,512); silence is 12,275. Then: the top three were all seen, 14 of 15 runs it did nothing; a female, 38,573 spikes, made it sing 5 of 5.

On a dark screen: 'a fruit fly brain is learning to read'. Letters R, K and G in fonts it never practised flash; lime dots light up where its Kenyon cells really fired, and it answers each one right. A learning curve climbs from 3.8% (guessing) to 86% over 293,000 lessons. Then the letters it still mixes up (P read as F, E as L, H as N, Q as O), and a front leg drawing an R in lime over a grey guide. It ends: '86% on fonts i've never seen. P still looks like F to me.'

A viewer's comment card about existential thoughts, then a fruit fly brain model seen from the front in deep blue. Nothing is given to it: no smell, no light, no sound. In one real run it still fires 12,264 spikes, shown as faint flickers across the brain. The answer: i never go quiet.

A 24-hour dial around a fruit fly brain drawn as an X-ray from its real neuropil surfaces. The sky changes with the hour while an illustrated activity curve fills in: a peak at dusk, low at night, a rise before dawn, a morning peak, a midday siesta. Then the clock's home, the accessory medulla, lights up on both sides of the brain, with a note that the clock genes were found in flies and that a wiring map has the clock's 52 named cells but not its tick.

A paper-cut animation. Two cows, one plain black and one painted with zebra stripes; flies land on the plain one. Stripes slide right; frame by frame the brain picks the nearest stripe so they seem to go left, like a car wheel spinning backwards on video. A fly eye sees in dots. FlyVis, a model of the fly visual system, run 50 times: motion cells read fine stripes moving right as moving left. Bar chart: fine stripes 90 percent regular, 53 percent irregular; medium 11 and 10; wide 1 and 3. Painted cow stripes flip most from 50 to 80 cm away. Ends: illusions are not only human.

On dark green, one drawn fruit fly through eight dates: 1910 its eyes turn white (Morgan), 1927 an X-ray negative (Muller), 1980 its body segments, 1984 a clock on its thorax, 1996 alarm rings (Toll), 2001 77 of 100 dots (human disease genes with a fly match), 2024 a brain's wiring (FlyWire, 139,255 neurons), now the brain glowing: a copy, 165,122 neurons. It ends: five nobel prizes, small enough to map whole, close enough to you to matter.

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📍 📍 📍 📍 📍 📍 📍 The odor that has been associated with the punishment becomes now a predictor. And it gains the ability to instruct the dopaminergic system itself. So it's no longer the, the electric shock punishment that is harmful for the animal and is to be avoided, but the predictive odor itself can drive those dopaminergic neurons themselves.

And this can again be associated with a new odor, and this odor can then again drive the dopaminergic neurons and predict that this will cause punishment, and so on and so forth.

A stopwatch race on cream paper. Six lanes, one per real run of a fruit fly brain model: water, bitter and sugar on the tongue, bitter and sugar under the feet, and the smell of cake. Each lane fills with ticks, one per real spike, and stops at the first spike of the cell that answers: mouth neuron 52.0 ms for water, reverse neuron 53.0 and 64.1 for bitter, mouth neuron 75.4 and 75.6 for sugar, mouth neuron 190.7 for the smell of cake.

A quiz on navy blue: 'guess what i did'. Five questions, each a card (the smell of old meat, something touching my antennae, air moving over my antennae, the sun above my jar, a female near) with four answers and a 3-2-1 count. The real answers from a fruit fly brain model, 5 of 5 runs each: went towards it, groomed, backed away, did nothing, sang.