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[00:00.41] Fruit flies can walk, hover and the males can even sing love songs to woo females.

[00:12.36] All this, and these flies have a brain that's tinier than a pinhead.

[00:16.61] Researchers have taken a closer look and found that it's a tangle of more than 130,000 separate wires called neurons – all packed together, making more than 50 million separate connections to each other.

[00:30.42] It's taken them ten years, using advanced artificial intelligence systems, to identify its detailed structure, composition and connections.

[00:39.46] In essence, a wiring diagram, scientifically called the fly connectome.

[00:44.50] Even though human brains are a million times larger than a fly's, Dr Gregory Jefferis of the Medical Research Council Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge says that the new connectome is the first step in truly understanding, not just how fly brains work, but ours, too.

[01:02.83] That's because there are likely to be similarities in the way they're both wired.

[01:07.88] It will take decades to have a complete map of the human brain.

[01:11.59] But this analysis of fruit flies is the start of a new, deeper understanding of our own minds.