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Which species to focus on? Here are my opinions. In addition to being opinions on what things people should experiment on, I'm also trying to decide which animals' systems neuroscience I should spend time to become familiar with.
Every group of species has its own sets of peculiarities, so what you really want to do is understand a set of different species that are phylogenetically far removed from one another so that you can figure out what the "core elements" of neural computation are.
You'd like to study intelligent animals because the algorithms underlying intelligence are what you ultimately want to learn about. But it's also good to study animals with small nervous systems so that you can get semi-comprehensive data, that is, data about the connectivity and behavior of a reasonable fraction of the entire neural network in a single individual.
The most intelligent animal is the human, so that's one to study.
The most intelligent mammal that is a common model animal and that is relatively cheap to buy is the mouse, so that's one.
Birds are also really intelligent, and they're not mammals, so pick a bird. Zebrafinch singing is an interesting topic because it's a case where a temporal sequence is encoded into memory. Because the performance of the learned song is a behavior that can be repeatedly evoked, and because a song can be naturally characterized in a quantifiable way, I think this is a great opportunity to find out what the data format of a sequential memory is, at least in this one case. So add in Zebra finch.
The coleoid cephalopods are thought to contain the most intelligent invertebrates. So throw in octopus. Recent evidence suggests that the most recent common ancestor of octopuses and human may have had a primitive CNS (see this link for a summary), so maybe we have more in common with them than we think. Octopuses also have the advantage of having what seems to be smaller, simpler nervous systems than many mammals; see for instance The octopus: a model for a comparative analysis of the evolution of learning and memory mechanisms by Hochner et al '06.
Now for really simple animals. The Kristan lab does fascinating work on leech decision-making. I'm still investigating other potential simple model animals. Teleost fish are one possible model that would help get at the common elements of vertebrate neural organization.
So so far the list of animals to study is, in ascending order of intractability:
To rephrase this in terms of goals, the goals are:
I guess we've left out the arthropods. this course talks about them. Also, a lot of people study insects, so maybe an insect representative should be selected too.
(now there's a few lifetimes worth of work to do, huh!)
I guess the worm and the fly are also favorite neurobio model organisms, so maybe they should be added. I am more interested in comparative systems and computational neuroscience, however, so the genetic advantages of these organisms don't help me here; and the C elegans isn't the easiest organism to do electrophys on, I've heard.
Other links:
