Data from: Dynamic structure of locomotor behavior in walking fruit flies

The function of the brain is unlikely to be understood without an accurate
description of its output, yet the nature of movement elements and their
organization remains an open problem. Here, movement elements are
identified from dynamics of walking in flies, using unbiased criteria. On
one time scale, dynamics of walking are consistent over hundreds of
milliseconds, allowing elementary features to be defined. Over longer
periods, walking is well described by a stochastic process composed of
these elementary features, and a generative model of this process
reproduces individual behavior sequences accurately over seconds or
longer. Within elementary features, velocities diverge, suggesting that
dynamical stability of movement elements is a weak behavioral constraint.
Rather, long-term instability can be limited by the finite memory between
these elementary features. This structure suggests how complex dynamics
may arise in biological systems from elements whose combination need not
be tuned for dynamic stability.