Mushroom Bodies

Professor David Anderson explains that the mushroom body is a structure in the insect brain involved in learning and memory. It has been compared to the cerebral cortex in humans.

A mushroom body is a structure in the insect brain, which has been shown to play a key role in learning and memory in insects, particularly in fruit flies. So, that's the part of the brain where the fly can learn to recognize a particular odor and to associate it with either a bad thing or a good thing - to know whether to avoid the odor or approach the odor.

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