They can walk, hover, and the males can even sing love songs to court, all with brains smaller than the head of a pin.
Now, for the first time, scientists studying the fly brain have determined the position, shape and connections of each of its 130.000 cells and 50 million neuronal connections.
It is the most detailed analysis of the brain of an adult animal ever done.
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One leading brain expert who was not involved in the research described the breakthrough as a "huge leap" in understanding one's own brain.
One of the research leaders said it would give new insight into the "mechanism of thinking".
Dr Gregory Jefferies, from the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, told BBC News that we currently have no idea how the network of brain cells in each of our heads enables us to interact with others and the world around us.
"What are these connections?
"How do the signals travel through the system that allows us to process information to recognize someone's face, that allows you to hear my voice and turn these words into electrical signals?
"Mapping the fly brain is a truly remarkable achievement and will help us understand how our own brains work."
We have a million times more brain cells, or neurons, than the fruit fly that was studied.
So how can a wiring diagram of an insect's brain help scientists understand how we think?
The images created by the scientists, which were published in the scientific journal Nature, show wiring that is as beautiful as it is complex.
Its shape and structure are the key to understanding how such a small organ can perform so many powerful computational tasks.
Developing a computer the size of a poppy seed that can perform all these tasks is far beyond the capabilities of modern science.
Dr. Mala Murthy, also one of the leaders of the project, from Princeton University in the United States (USA), says that the new wiring diagram, scientifically known as a connectome (a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain), will represent a "revolution in neuroscience".
"It will help researchers better understand how a healthy brain works."
"We hope that in the future it will be possible to compare what happens when things go wrong in our brains."
Dr. Lucia Prieto Godolo, who heads the brain research group at the Francis Crick Institute in London, and who is not a member of the research team, agrees.
"Researchers have completed the connectome of a worm that has 300 wires and a worm that has three thousand, but to have a complete connectome of something with 130.000 wires is an incredible technical feat that paves the way to finding a connectome for larger brains such as the mouse brain and perhaps for several decade and human".
The researchers were able to identify separate circuits for many individual functions and show how they are connected.
For example, the wires involved in movement are located in the brainstem, while the wires for visual processing are located in the cerebrum.
More neurons are involved in visual processing, because seeing requires much more computing power.
While scientists already knew that separate circuits existed, they did not know how they were interconnected.
Why is it so difficult to kill a fly with a flail or a newspaper?
Other researchers are already using circuit diagrams to figure out, for example, why flies are so hard to kill with a flail or newspaper.
The vision circuit detects which direction your rolled-up newspaper is coming from and transmits the signal to the fly's legs.
However, the most important thing is that they send a stronger signal to jump with the legs that are further from the object that threatens danger.
So you could say that flies change direction without having to think - literally faster than the speed of thought.
This discovery may explain why sluggish people rarely succeed in 'swatting' flies.
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The wiring diagram was created by slicing up a fly's brain using a device that's essentially a microscopic cheese grater, photographing each of the 7.000 pieces and digitally stitching them together.
Then the Princeton team used artificial intelligence to derive the shapes and connections of all the neurons.
But the artificial intelligence wasn't perfect—researchers still had to manually fix more than three million errors.
This in itself is an incendiary technical feat, but the job was only half done.
The map itself was meaningless without a description of what each wire was supposed to do, says Dr. Philip Schlegel, who also works at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
"This data is a bit like Google Maps, but of the brain: the very wiring diagram between neurons is like knowing which structures correspond to streets and buildings.
"Describing a neuron is like adding street and city names, business hours, phone numbers, reviews, etc. on the map.
"You need both to be really useful."
The Fly Connectome is available to any scientist who wants to use it to conduct their own research.
Dr. Schlegel believes that thanks to this new map, the world of neuroscience will see "an avalanche of discoveries in the next few years."
The human brain is much larger than a fly's brain, and we don't yet have the technology to get all the information about its wiring.
But researchers believe that maybe in 30 years it will be possible to connect the human brain.
The brain of the fly, they say, represents the beginning of a new, deeper understanding of how our own mind works.
The research was carried out as part of an international collaboration project of a large number of scientists, called the FlyWire Consortium.
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