Separating wiring-specific from statistical control of dynamics in a complete connectome

Electron-microscopy reconstruction now yields complete synaptic wiring diagrams, or connectomes, of entire small brains, including the larval Drosophila, the first insect brain reconstructed in full. How far a wiring diagram alone fixes a circuit's activity, as opposed to the finer physiological detail it does not record, is debated. We run a complete connectome as a fixed, rate-based dynamical operator in which no single-neuron parameter is fitted, so that, at one fixed dynamical regime, the model's behavior reflects the wiring and its connection strengths rather than tuned single-neuron physiology, and compare it against a hierarchy of randomized networks that each preserve a coarser description of the wiring. The model's overall dynamical regime, how strongly and how richly it responds, is mostly statistical: networks keeping only the connectome's coarse wiring statistics reproduce it. The wiring beyond these statistics instead sets where activity travels and which circuits shape it. Sparse input is confined to a compact olfactory pathway that randomized networks flood, and the mushroom body, the insect learning center, takes an outsized role in the leading adjoint-side modes, the directions that weigh which neurons shape the recurrent dynamics. Coarse statistics set the regime; the precise pattern of connections sets the geometry, a separation that clarifies which connectome-based claims rest on wiring alone.

Source: arXiv:2606.17745v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17745v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.17745v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17745v1