Brain to Behaviours

Whether big or small, animal brains are made from nerve cells (neurons) wired together in circuits. Some circuits are highly specialised, controlling one specific behaviour in response to a particular stimulus. Others are much more complex, compiling lots of different types of information from the senses and triggering a range of actions. To find out more about how this works in a simple system, researchers have been studying the nervous system in leeches using a combination of highly sensitive methods for visualising nerve cells and measuring their activity. This image shows the individual nerve cells in a cluster known as a ganglion, with different colours highlighting various activity patterns during different behaviours such as swimming, crawling or escaping from danger. This technique enables researchers to analyse the inputs and outputs from single neurons, leading to deeper understanding of how they are wired together to create circuits and generate specific actions.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Mária Ashaber, Yusuke Tomina and Pegah Kassraian, and colleagues
• Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, February 2021