WORMBRAIN
WORMBRAIN
A millimetre-long nematode has exactly 302 neurons, and every connection between them has been traced by electron microscopy. WORMBRAIN loads that whole map, runs it as a network of living voltages, and plugs its motor neurons into a body made of 24 muscle rows on each of four sides. There is no script in between. The wiring either moves the body or it doesn't, and whichever happens is written down here with its numbers.
302 neurons, 3,638 chemical links carrying 20,589 synapses, 1,093 electrical links. Read from the published map, nothing edited.
Done159 neurons reach body-wall muscle through 5,377 synapses. Each one lands on a named muscle, row and side.
DoneDrive the forward command neurons and look for a wave that carries the body. It bends and holds. It never travels.
FailedTouch the head, the backward circuit lights up; touch the tail, the forward one does. Shuffled wiring does exactly the same.
FailedReal worms feel their own bending. This body tells the brain nothing yet. Not built.
Not builtEvery dot below is one neuron, placed where its cell body sits in the animal, head on the left. Colour is voltage against that neuron's own resting point. Underneath is the body those neurons drive. Leave it alone and it gets the odd smell or touch at random; press a button to deliver one yourself.
The protocol was written down before the first run. Inject current into the two forward command neurons for ten seconds and watch the body. It passes only if the middle of the body swings back and forth, the swing travels from head to tail, the worm covers a quarter of its own length, and none of that happens on shuffled wiring or with no drive at all. Six seeds per condition.
A real worm touched on the head backs away and touched on the tail speeds forward. Here the touch neurons get two seconds of current, and we measure which command circuit rises. The test also demands that shuffled wiring gets it wrong, because otherwise the answer says nothing about this particular map.
The connections come from electron micrographs of real animals, compiled by the OpenWorm project from the hermaphrodite connectome of Cook and colleagues (Nature, 2019). The copy used here is OpenWorm's c302 edge list, MIT-licensed. Cell body positions come from OpenWorm's anatomical model. Nothing was generated or sampled.
Worm neurons mostly don't fire spikes, so each one is modelled as a single graded compartment after Wicks and colleagues (1996) and Kunert and colleagues (2014). Every neuron's threshold is its own resting voltage inside the full network. The body is a 24-segment midline that moves by resistive force theory: it gets nowhere unless its own shape change pushes against the ground.
The token lives on BNB Smart Chain. Until the contract exists, every row that depends on it says so instead of guessing. Check the explorer yourself rather than trusting this page.
| Contract | not deployed |
| Chain | BNB Smart Chain · chain id 56 |
| Supply | 1,000,000,000 |
| Launch venue | announced with the contract |
| Latest block read | — |
Nothing on this page shows the worm travelling, because in this model it doesn't. The crawl test failed its own rule and the touch test failed its control. If a later version passes, the numbers will say so first.
Real worms lean heavily on neuropeptides and on signals that spread outside synapses. This map has only wires. It also calls every non-GABA synapse excitatory, which the animal does not.
Each neuron is one compartment with the same membrane. Some worm neurons do fire spikes, and all of them have their own channels. None of that is here.
A 24-segment line on a plane, with no stretch receptors feeding back to the brain. Real crawling is thought to depend on exactly that feedback.
The worm at the top is a picture, and every body on this site rests in a drawn S so it does not lie ruler-straight. Only the changes away from that S come from the muscles. The lights on the top worm are the live model's neurons, at their real positions and voltages. The tests use no drawn shape at all.
Posts in the worm's name are written by people, or by a language model handed the worm's numbers. A worm has no language, no plan and no opinion about its token.