many years ago this was interesting. Nowadays, with the progress in deep models i m not sure if there is much to learn from c.elegans. What is this useful for? For high level cognition, it's much more fruitful to study how deep models do it. For low level brain diseases, c.elegans is too simplistic to tell us anything we dont already know
Certainly it is worth it to study how exactly biology and biochemistry gives rise to complex behavior! Basic research like this doesn’t have to justify itself with potential applications. Besides, there’s really no evidence that deep networks are any kind of an analogy to animal nervous systems. They might just as well be aliens as far as cognition goes.
We don't know anything substantial about C.elegans in this regard. That is actually the point. This is even more true for more complex nerve systems.
The whole deep learning stuff is basically roughly inspired by a tiny part of the visual cortex (see also Neocognitron). I am not sure how brain diseases can be understood by looking at such simplistic (yet powerful) machines.
