Evoked responses

 I started reading Doctor Carsen Stringer's PhD thesis:-) https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10041247/1/stringer_thesis.pdf

I wrote a poem about what is so mysterious about neural activity and how it adapts to the surrounding environment. 

Evoked responses are modulated

By a common pattern

The sensory information itself

Is an orchestrator

Organizer

Supervisor

But the information structure

In synaptic connections

Is also a pattern

An activity pattern

In an activity pattern

To make a whole

It is a bit of a koan. 

Over lunch we discussed Descartes and his theory that the spirit orchestrates the activity in the brain like a puppet master. 

Do you believe in organization without control? A lawful behavior without a governor? Is there a ghost in the machine organizing the unseen?