Observations: Consider the crayfish: How a claw-full of neurons makes crustaceans crawl [Video]

Observations: Consider the crayfish: How a claw-full of neurons makes crustaceans crawl [Video]: "Kagaya and Takahata found that just 45 individual neurons spiked right before the crayfish started walking on its own—whether it was walking forward or backward. Some of the readiness discharge neurons were those that were also active while the crayfish was walking and others that were involved in the stopping process, suggesting that 'the main synaptic activation for voluntarily initiated walking of crayfish takes place in the medial protocerebrum,' the area of the arthropod brain that also receives visual input and information from other organs. This means that the neural signals the animal employs to get going are 'organized and activated by presynaptic brain neurons, not by endogenous mechanisms,' they explained in their study."