Apart from being an increase in knowledge, it could have significant implications for our understanding of the experiences of non-human animals.

It appears that mice have a claustrum, and I would be very interested to see the effect of manipulating that area on their behaviour. If it has little effect, one might conclude that mice don't experience consciousness the way we do, for example, or the reverse.

Edit: here is an open access version of Crick & Koch's paper on the claustrum:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569501/