Seriously. This is the craziest science story I've had the pleasure to be involved with. Granted, about 90% of the data I'm going to show is from my friend and colleague Bruno van Swinderen, but that doesn't make it less interesting, rather the opposite, of course This is it:

Mon, Oct 19, 3:00 - 4:00 PM
478.3/FF84 - Attention deficit and hyperactivity in a Drosophila memory mutant

The story is about a Drosophila memory mutant called radish. Besides being defective in so-called anaesthesia-resistant memory in classical olfactory learning, we show on the poster that it also attends less to certain stimuli in our behavioral essays. Bruno also managed to record brain waves from the animals and his data suggest that one can see attention-like effects in these brain waves. For instance, in normal flies, one can see that a change in the stimulus situation is followed by a characteristical response in these brain waves which dies down after a certain amount of time (novelt effect). This novelty effect is largely absent in the radish mutant flies. When we analyze the flies' flight behavior using Fourier transformation, we find a conspicuous 'fidgety' phenotype in the mutants, namely a peak in power at 1.6Hz. Interestingly, Bruno finds the same peak in the brain waves of the fly. This very specific 'fidgety' hyperactivity seems to prevent the flies from properly flying towards objects in their environment.
This is all pretty interesting, but here comes the clincher: When you put the flies on Ritalin, typically used to treat humans with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), most of these symptoms either go away or get much better. we show that the flies' dopaminergic system is mediating the Ritalin effects.
So it's all a very exciting story, come and see the data for yourself this afternoon and try to poke holes in our arguments!