[hprotagonist]

For the Nobel winning work on this from long ago, I heartily recommend:

  Hodgkin, A. L. (1958). The Croonian Lecture: Ionic Movements and Electrical Activity in Giant   Nerve Fibres. Biological Sciences, 148(930), 1–37. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/83088

This contains my absolute favorite figure caption ever:

A fresh and lively squid was taken out of the aquarium and immobilized by cutting the nerves connecting the head with the stellate ganglion. The mantle was opened ventrally by a single cut and was spread out under cooled oxygenated sea water in a transparent dish. Using a motor car headlamp to illuminate the animal and a binocular microscope to watch the penetration,...

[gigama]

Somewhere in the multiverse, a scientifically curious Heptapod takes a fresh and lively humanoid from its terrarium and immobilizes it by cutting the nerves connecting the stellate ganglion...

[trhway]

Ender's Game series comes to mind.

[nextaccountic]

Poor squid. :(

[CamperBob2]

Wir müssen wissen – wir werden wissen. - Epitaph of David Hilbert

We do what we want, because we can. - GLaDOS

Take your pick of rationales, it's not gonna end well for Mr. Squid.

[hprotagonist]

Interestingly, the experiment in Figure 2 was to demonstrate that action potentials could be generated from isolated neurons in buffer solution just as well as they could from an exposed neuron in situ -- so the squid still dies, but it's not tortured to death.