I've been blogging about my good friend Bruno van Swinderen and his work a couple of times now. Therefore I'm especially pleased to be able to cover his recent publication in the prestigious journal Science. As is often the case with such high-profile publications, the general media has also picked up on the story and you can read about his fantastic work on Scitizen, BrainAtlas and Discover Magazine.
In brief, what he discovered was a remarkable genetic link between attention and memory in fruit flies ( Drosophila). Bruno has this amazing set-up where he records brain activity (field potentials) while the animals are seeing visual patterns (e.g. squares and crosses) circling around them. Looking at this activity, he can tell whether the flies notice certain manipulations he does to the patterns. For example, normal flies can easily pick up if one of the patterns gets exchanged for another. If he tests mutant flies which are defective in learning and memory, he finds that their attention span to the novel pattern is greatly reduced.
Now that I write this, it occurs to me that an alternative explanation may be that the mutants simply don't remember the old patterns long enough to show brain activity to a new one. Hmm, I know he reads this blog occasionally, maybe he can answer me here