I’m not sure that anyone is really an expert on this thing. We don’t even know much of what we don’t know, you know? But I enjoy reading current research on neurology.
Wait. What?
Why did anyone think that to begin with? Do other organs wash out toxins during sleep?
Maybe understanding the fly brain will help. However, it is the size of a poppy seed
Excerpt:
It took more than a decade for the scientists to produce the first high-resolution model of the fly brain. Based on the different shapes of the neurons, Gregory Jefferis, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, and his colleagues classified the cells into 8,453 distinct types, making it the biggest catalog of cell types in any brain. (Scientists have identified only 3,300 cell types in the human brain.)
By tracing the neurons through the map, Dr. Murthy and her colleagues have gleaned clues about what those different types of cells do.
Some types of neurons, for example, command walking flies to come to a halt. One circuit, researchers found, stops the flies by blocking the walking commands, and a second stops a fly by stiffening its leg joints.
Philip Shiu and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, used the map to build a virtual fly brain, with simulated neurons passing signals to connected cells.
Dr. Shiu’s team tested the simulated brain by seeing how it responded to food. A fly’s tongue-like proboscis is covered in neurons that are sensitive to sugar. The researchers activated them and watched the signals race through the fly’s brain…
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/science/fruit-fly-brain-mapped.html