An interview with SBCS’s Professor Lars Chittka is featured in the latest issue of Current Biology. Professor Chittka talks about his long held interests in how insects are able to perform complex cognitive tasks with only minimal neural circuitry. Although he started university in the small town of Göttingen, Professor Chittka says he felt uninspired by the local nightlife and moved to Berlin, where he undertook PhD research on bee vision. This work led to the fascinating discovery that the spectral sensitivity of bees’ eyes closely matched the colours of flowers, which he later discovered was actually due to flowers evolving to exploit bee vision rather than the other way around. Since moving at Queen Mary several years ago, Professor Chittka has helped to establish the School’s Research Centre for Psychology, members of which study psychological and cognitive processes in a range of organisms from a uniquely evolutionary perspective.