WiredMind — a real fly brain you can poke, in your browser

Free classroom lessons on the real wiring of a fruit fly's nervous system. Students stimulate and silence neurons from the MaleCNS connectome in the browser, with no install and no login, in their own language.

Open WiredMind · Languages · What's real and what's simplified · Roadmap and good first issues

3 lessons · 11,500 real neurons · 18 languages · 10 minutes each · no install, no login, no ads

Press a button and a smell travels from the fly's antennae to where its memories are stored. Silence one cell, the giant fiber, and a 30-millisecond escape jump never happens. Every one of those neurons, and every synapse between them, was reconstructed from a real fly.

Every neuron and synapse count in WiredMind comes from MaleCNS v1.0, the complete connectome of a male fruit fly's central nervous system. The activity is a deliberately simple simulation, and the section below says exactly where that line falls. Each lesson's claims are checked by tests that run it on the real circuits, and the heavy neuron data stays out of git so the repository is something a stranger can clone.

The lessons

Lesson	What students do	Circuit
1. How a fly remembers a smell	Send a smell from the receptors to the Kenyon cells and output neurons, then silence the Kenyon cells and see what goes dark.	Smell pathway, 4,500 neurons
2. How a fly knows which way it's facing	Push the compass bump around with the turn neurons, then silence the ring neurons and watch it drift.	Head-direction compass, 4,000 neurons
3. The 30-millisecond escape	Follow a swatter from the looming neurons to the giant fiber and the jump neurons, then silence the giant fiber.	Giant fiber escape, 3,000 neurons

Each lesson is a mission. It opens on a short comic about a fly, zooms from a 3D fly body through its brain and the lesson's circuit down to one neuron, and then gives the student four or five one-tap steps, a prediction to make before the step that tests it, one check question, a win screen, and free play: about 10 minutes in all. For a class, that is one or two periods with discussion. The Share button copies a link that replays a student's run, spike for spike.

For teachers. Every lesson has a short "How to read this brain" intro behind its "?" button, keeps a color key on the canvas, and explains each scientific term on a tap. "Show me how it works" plays the lesson's ideal run with its text in step, and class mode (?mode=class) sizes everything for a shared screen: a projector, a TV, or one computer. Each lesson has a teacher guide (/en/teachers/escape) with a 45-minute plan, the story in brief, a question to ask at each level of the zoom, the prediction and its expected answer, expected answers, discussion questions, and common misconceptions, and a one-page student worksheet (/en/teachers/escape/worksheet); both print on A4. None of it sets a cookie or uses browser storage.

Languages

Every page and every lesson is served in 18 languages, each at its own indexed address (/he/modules/escape, /ja/about), with hreflang links, a sitemap per language, and a share image rendered in the reader's own script.

Language	Path	Language	Path	Language	Path
English	/en	Deutsch	/de	한국어	/ko
עברית ↔	/he	Português (Brasil)	/pt-BR	हिन्दी	/hi
العربية ↔	/ar	Русский	/ru	Italiano	/it
Español	/es	简体中文	/zh-CN	Türkçe	/tr
Français	/fr	日本語	/ja	Polski	/pl
Nederlands	/nl	Bahasa Indonesia	/id	Tiếng Việt	/vi

↔ Hebrew and Arabic flip the whole layout right to left, the lesson panels and controls included.

Which language you see. Only the bare address / ever guesses, and it tries, in order: a language you picked from the language menu (the one cookie WiredMind sets), your browser's languages, your country when it has one clear classroom language (Israel gets Hebrew, Brazil Portuguese), then English. It only accepts a close relative (Malay readers get Indonesian) and never a cross-language guess, so Ukrainian readers get English, not Russian. A URL that names its language is always served in that language, so a shared lesson opens the way it was shared.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗