It has been almost 10 years now that we have come to the realization that a particular type of our operant experiments can be classified as motor learning. In such “operant self-learning” experiments, the animal learns about the consequences of its own behavior and adjusts future behavior accordingly.

I was very excited when our latest research paper came out, after all, I was confident our 30-year-long search for the sites of plasticity in the form of motor learning we study was coming to an end. In this work, we were fairly confident that underlying the type of learning we study was a novel form of plasticity in a very specific set of motor neurons in the ventral nerve cord of the flies we use for our research.