A tiny brain no bigger than a sesame seed may hold the key to transforming artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, thanks to groundbreaking research revealing how bees use their flight movements to enhance learning and recognition.
Scientists at the University of Sheffield have uncovered that bees don’t just passively see the world – they actively shape their visual perception through body movements during flight.
By building a computational model that mimics a bee’s brain, researchers have demonstrated how the insect’s unique flight patterns generate distinct neural signals, enabling it to identify complex visual patterns, such as flowers or even human faces, with remarkable accuracy.
“In this study we’ve successfully demonstrated that even the tiniest of brains can leverage movement to perceive and understand the world around them,’ said Professor James Marshall, a senior author on the study.
“This shows us that a small, efficient system – albeit the result of millions of years of evolution – can perform computations vastly more complex than we previously thought possible,” he added.
A comparison to the previous experiment
The current experiment is an upgrade on the team’s previous attempts to understand how bees use active vision to collect and process information.
Their earlier experiment dealt with studying how bees fly around and inspect certain patterns, while the current one sheds light on the underlying brain mechanisms driving that behavior.
“In our previous work, we were fascinated to discover that bees employ a clever scanning shortcut to solve visual puzzles. But that just told us what they do; for this study, we wanted to understand how,” said Dr. HaDi MaBouDi, a researcher at the University of Sheffield.
“Our model of a bee’s brain demonstrates that its neural circuits are optimised to process visual information not in isolation, but through active interaction with its flight movements in the natural environment, supporting the theory that intelligence comes from how the brain, bodies, and the environment work together,” he continued.
Does brain size matter for intelligence?
This question has sparked the interest of scientists for ages. Professor Lars Chittka from the University of London finally answered this question, courtesy to this experiment.
“Scientists have been fascinated by the question of whether brain size predicts intelligence in animals. But such speculations make no sense unless one knows the neural computations that underpin a given task,” he revealed.
“Here we determine the minimum number of neurons required for difficult visual discrimination tasks and find that the numbers are staggeringly small, even for complex tasks such as human face recognition. Thus, insect microbrains are capable of advanced computations,” he stated.
This study, a collaboration with Queen Mary University of London, was published in the journal eLife.
Can bees show the future path of AI?
Inspired by the agility and endurance of bees, researchers at MIT have developed robotic insects designed to assist artificial pollination – an innovation that could transform agriculture.
Weighing less than a paperclip, these robotic insects can also perform double aerial flips and complete acrobatic maneuvers while flying.
The main aim is to have these robotic insects perform precise pollination that can help farmers grow fruits and vegetables inside multilevel warehouses. This could also help boost yields and mitigate some of agriculture’s harmful effects on the environment.
By studying insect brains and behavior, researchers uncover intelligence principles inspiring new technologies. Building on this, MIT’s robotic pollinators mimic natural flight to improve agriculture, showcasing how biology guides advancements in AI and robotics for real-world solutions.