In his short story ‘Funes the Memorious’ Jorge Luis Borges tells of a young boy called Ireneo Funes who, after he was thrown off a wild horse, developed the ability to perceive everything and forget nothing. As a consequence, ‘he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details’. The ability to draw analogies between phenomena that are not identical, to identify imperfect patterns, is key to analytical thought and scientific discovery. Correspondingly, simple invertebrate model organisms have yielded some of the best insights into the cellular and molecular basis of behaviour in more complex organisms, including humans. Now, in eLife, René García and colleagues at Texas A&M; University, including Brigitte LeBoeuf as first author, have closely examined one of the most complex behaviours exhibited by the roundworm *Caenorhabditis elegans* male mating (LeBoeuf et al., 2014).
This was an Insight article I wrote to accompany an eLife paper from René García’s lab that identified the neural circuit in C. elegans males responsible for regulating the post-mating refractory period that follows ejaculation.
Here is a link to the paper: Caenorhabditis elegans male sensory-motor neurons and dopaminergic support cells couple ejaculation and post-ejaculatory behaviors