Skip to content
WiredMind

Free neuroscience lessons for the classroom

Fire a neuron in a real fruit fly’s brain and watch the signal race from its eyes to its legs.

WiredMind runs the real wiring diagram of a fruit fly’s nervous system in the browser. Students stimulate neurons, silence them, and see what changes, in three short guided lessons.

Start the first lessonFor teachers

Loading the circuit…

  1. Looming neurons spot the swatter304 cells · 0.2 ms
  2. The giant fiber fires2 cells · 4.0 ms
  3. The jump neurons kick2 cells · 13.2 ms

The first 64 ms after a swatter appears, from the escape lesson, slowed 100 times. The wiring is real, from the MaleCNS connectome. The spikes come from a simple simulation. What’s simplified

Three lessons, one real nervous system

Each lesson is a few taps long. Students stimulate and silence real cell types, answer one question, then explore on their own.

  1. Lesson 1

    How a fly remembers a smell

    Send a smell into a real fly brain and find the cells that remember it.

    • Smell receptors
    • Projection neurons
    • Kenyon cells
    • Output neurons
    5 steps and a question · about 10 minutes

  2. Lesson 2

    How a fly knows which way it's facing

    Push a real fly's compass around and see what holds it in place.

    • Ring neurons
    • Compass neurons
    • Left turn neurons
    • Right turn neurons
    4 steps and a question · about 10 minutes

  3. Lesson 3

    The 30-millisecond escape

    Find the wire that gets a fly out from under a swatter.

    • Looming neurons
    • Giant fiber
    • Jump neurons
    4 steps and a question · about 10 minutes

For teachers

Put the link on the board or send it to students’ own devices. Nothing else to set up.

  • 1–2 class periods

    Each lesson takes about 10 minutes. All three, with discussion, fit in one or two periods.

  • No install, no login

    It runs in the browser on laptops, Chromebooks, tablets, and phones. Students never make an account or type an email.

  • Free

    No ads, no paid tier, nothing to buy.

  • Open source

    The code is MIT licensed, so you can read how it works or run your own copy.

  • Shareable runs

    The Share button copies a link that replays a student’s run, spike for spike, so you see what they saw.

  • Honest about the science

    A simple model of real wiring. The about page says exactly what is real and what is simplified.

View the source on GitHub (opens in a new tab)What’s real and what’s simplifiedSomething unclear or broken? Tell me. (opens in a new tab)

Where the neurons come from

Every neuron and synapse count comes from the MaleCNS v1.0 connectome (opens in a new tab) of the male fruit fly’s central nervous system, made by HHMI Janelia FlyEM (opens in a new tab), the University of Cambridge (opens in a new tab), the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (opens in a new tab), and Google Research (opens in a new tab).

Berg, S., Beckett, I. R., Costa, M., Schlegel, P., Januszewski, M., et al. (2026). Sexual dimorphism in the complete Drosophila male central nervous system connectome. Cell 189, 5504–5526.e15. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2026.08.015 (opens in a new tab)

The data is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab). WiredMind changes it: it cuts out three small circuits, drops connections of fewer than five synapses, and draws each neuron as a simplified line. The simulator uses the neuron model of Shiu et al. (2024) (opens in a new tab).