I'm a scientist, I study squid axons.

Squid nerves. Axons are the long thin parts of nerves. When you hurt your toe the message gets to your brain by travelling along nerve axons.

Calamari? Ika? Squid are animals that live in the sea, relatives of octopuses and cuttlefish.

Squid have the largest nerve axons, up to a millimeter in diameter. Human nerve axons are 0.001-0.020 mm in diameter. The large size makes it easier to do my experiments.

No!! It's the squid giant axon. The squid I use are 20-30 cm long, mantle length, not counting the tentacles. Giant squid are 20-30 meters but apparently don't have axons as big as the North Atlantic common squid (Clyde Roper, personal communication). Actually I only work on one particular squid giant axon, the biggest one. Squid have 20-30 giant axons to run their escape response. The large diameter makes the axons conduct faster which gives the squid quicker reflexes. Squid are in the Class Mollusca, with snails. They are fast snails which have grown giant axons to allow themselves to hunt fish.

I care about nerves in general. As far as is known all nerve axons work about the same. So what I learn from squid axons is probably applicable to humans. Most of what is known about the mechanisms underlying nerve conduction were discovered on squid axons. Anyone who has been a medical student will have heard about them.

Probably the details are different, their body plan is quite different. The nervous system is more than just axons. Nerve cells also talk to each other through synapses. The decision making happens in or near the synapses. There are people who study squid synapses, which are also large, but I've stuck with axons.

Hundreds, world wide. The most famous are Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley who won the Nobel prize for some of their squid axon work. Hodgkin remarked in 1977 that "...the introduction of the squid giant nerve fibre by J. Z. Young in 1936 did more for neurophysiology and axonology than any other single advance during the past 40 years." The axon seems to have directly inspired at least one other Nobel prize winner, J.C. Skou

Your welcome.