Nervous system
Nervous systems are found in most multicellular animals, but vary greatly in complexity. The only multicellular animals that have no nervous system at all are sponges, placozoans, and mesozoans, which have very simple body plans. The nervous systems of the radially symmetric organisms ctenophores (comb jellies) and cnidarians (which include anemones, hydras, corals and jellyfish) consist of a diffuse nerve net. All other animal species, with the exception of a few types of worm, have a nervous system containing a brain, a central cord (or two cords running in parallel), and nerves radiating from the brain and central cord. The size of the nervous system ranges from a few hundred cells in the simplest worms, to around 300 billion cells in African elephants.
Pain in fish
Somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) are weak electric responses in the CNS following stimulation of peripheral sensory nerves. These further indicate there is a pathway from the peripheral nociceptors to higher brain regions. In goldfish, rainbow trout, Atlantic salmon ("Salmo salar") and Atlantic cod ("Gadus morhua"), it has been demonstrated that putatively non-noxious and noxious stimulation elicit SEPs in different brain regions, including the telencephalon which may mediate the co-ordination of pain information. Moreover, multiple functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with several species of fishes have shown that when suffering from putative pain, there is profound activity in the forebrain which is highly reminiscent of that observed in humans and would be taken as evidence of the experience of pain in mammals.