The worms are very special. Their nervous systems are weird because they have been heavily optimized to be small. A huge push to get the full connectome of Dros

The worms are very special. Their nervous systems are weird because they have been heavily optimized to be small. A huge push to get the full connectome of Drosophila is coming to an end right now, we are not there yet fully, but close. This research has already elucidated many things about how their brains work. People are discussing how to do the mouse now. In conjunction with functional experiments this research already explained many pathways such as olfactory associative learning, mating behavior and many others. None of these understandings came from simulations, but from multiple experiments and study of selected subcircuits. There were also successes in simulation of the visual pathway of drosophila, based on the connectomic data. For example this study [1] was able to reproduce direction sensitivity of a specific set of neurons. It isn’t necessarily true that we need to fully understand the worms before we should and can move on to more complex nervous systems and successfully understand them. It might just be that neuron abstractions don’t work well in worms, because of the mentioned evolutionary pressure to optimize for size. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.04793 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.04793