How do nerve cells compute?

As soon as we open our eyes and look around, we immediately realize where we are, which objects surround us, and in which direction they are moving. All this information is contained within the images that our e eyes deliver to our brain, but only implicitly: to extract it in an explicit way, our brain has to compute. But how do nerve cells compute? Using motion vision in the fruit fly Drosophila as an example for neural computation, we were able to answer this question in large parts within recent years.