http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070516071806.htm
ScienceDaily (May 16, 2007) — Free will and true
spontaneity exist ... in fruit flies. This is what scientists
report in a groundbreaking study in the May 16, 2007 issue
of the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
"Animals and especially insects
are usually seen as complex
robots which only respond to
external stimuli," says senior
author Björn Brembs from the
Free University Berlin. They are
assumed to be input-output
devices. "When scientists
observe animals responding
differently even to the same
external stimuli, they attribute
this variability to random errors
in a complex brain." Using a
combination of automated
behavior recording and
sophisticated mathematical
analyses, the international team
of researchers showed for the
first time that such variability
cannot be due to simple
random events but is generated
spontaneously and non-
randomly by the brain. These results caught computer
scientist and lead author Alexander Maye from the
University of Hamburg by surprise: "I would have never
guessed that simple flies who otherwise keep bouncing off
the same window have the capacity for nonrandom
spontaneity if given the chance."
snip
The next step will be to use genetics to localize and
understand the brain circuits responsible for the
spontaneous behavior. This step could lead directly to the
development of robots with the capacity for spontaneous
nonrandom behavior and may help combating disorders
leading to compromised spontaneous behavioral variability
in humans such as depression, schizophrenia or obsessive
compulsive disorder.
snip
Citation: Maye A, Hsieh C-h, Sugihara G, Brembs B (2007)
Order in Spontaneous Behavior. PLoS ONE 2(5): e443.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000443
(
http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0000443 )
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