One of the workhorses of in any biology lab is Caenorhabditis elegans or nematode worm just 1mm long. Biologist regularly use C. elegans to gain insight into topics ranging from embryonic development and aging to genetics and neurobiology.
In 1986, C. elegans became the first to have its entire nervous system mapped out. This creature, it turns out, contains just 302 neurons with 7000 synaptic connections between them, the fewest of any animal.
Scientists hoped that such a map — a connectome — would help them reverse-engineer the behavior of the nervous system by measuring how a stimulus to one neuron affects the others. This, they thought, would allow them to predict the behavior of the creature in any circumstances.
