Antennal lobe

The first stop for smells inside the fly’s brain, where the smell receptors hand their signal to the projection neurons.

See it in a lesson

Lesson 1
How a fly remembers a smell
Send a smell into a real fly brain and find where its memory is kept.
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Antennae: The two feelers on a fly’s head. A fly smells with them, the way you smell with your nose.
Smell receptors: Nerve cells on the antennae that fire when a smell lands on them. Every smell starts here.
Projection neurons: Nerve cells that carry the smell signal from the antennal lobe deeper into the brain, to the mushroom body.
Mushroom body: A mushroom-shaped part of an insect’s brain where smells are sorted and smell memories are stored.
Kenyon cells: The small nerve cells of the mushroom body. Each smell switches on a different handful of them, so every smell gets its own pattern.
Output neurons: Nerve cells that read the pattern of the Kenyon cells and pass it on to the rest of the brain. Scientists call them MBONs, short for mushroom body output neurons.