There is a question that science has been trying to answer for decades: Will it one day be possible to completely copy a biological brain and run it inside a computer? like the futuristic The Matrix movie, for a long time that seemed impossible, but now a curious experiment may have taken a small step in that direction.

Researchers managed to digitally recreate the entire brain of a fruit fly, that brain has around 125,000 neurons and approximately 50 million synaptic connections and now scientists claim to have managed to place it within a virtual world, simulating that entire system on a computer. Creating a complete digital copy of a biological brain is known as whole-brain emulation.

For decades seen as a kind of Holy Grail of artificial intelligence, instead of trying to program an artificial mind from scratch, scientists would simply copy a real brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. In the experiment presented by the company Eon Systems, the researchers used a detailed map of the fruit fly's brain connections developed by scientists at Princeton University.

That map shows exactly how the fly's neurons are connected. Based on that data, the team built a computational model capable of reproducing the insect's neural activity. Using a simulation environment called FlyWire, the digital brain went on to control a simulated version of the fly within a virtual world and the result is curious to say the least.

In the video released by the researchers, the digital fly can be seen moving its legs, rubbing its limbs and even drinking water within a small simulated environment. According to the scientists, these behaviors were not programmed manually, they arise directly from the neural activity of the immolated brain, that is, the brain receives sensory stimuli from the virtual environment, processes information and sends motor commands to the simulated body, thus closing the so-called sensory-motor cycle.

In other words, the digital brain perceives the environment and reacts to it. The model used by the researchers managed to predict the behavior of the real fly with about 95% accuracy. This suggests that the system is reproducing, at least in part, the biological logic of the original brain. Of course, we are still talking about an extremely simple brain. A human brain has around 86,000 million neurons, while that of a fly has only 125,000.

Even the brain of a mouse is already hundreds of times more complex, but researchers believe that the challenge now is mainly one of scale, first a fly, then a mouse and perhaps one day a complete human brain, if recreating a biological brain inside a computer seems like something worthy of science fiction, which we need to do.