[Verse 1]
Tonegawa's lab lit a single cell with light,
Tagged a memory, switched it on at night,
Mouse froze stiff in a room it never saw,
Engram's real, but we don't know the law —
Is it synapse weight or a molecule inside,
A protein scar where an old fear hides?
We can flip the switch but we can't read the code,
The engram's a postcard with no return road.
[Chorus]
Nobody knows, nobody knows, let the question grow,
Rate and timing, population flow,
Nobody knows, nobody knows,
Hold the mystery, steady and slow,
Count the spikes or clock them right,
Or poll the crowd mid-synaptic flight,
That's the neural code, three ciphers, one wire,
Science keeps on knocking at the neuron's choir.
[Verse 2]
One neuron shouts in a rate of spikes,
Ten per second, that's how it strikes,
Another neuron cares about the when,
Timing locks like a drummer's pen,
Then a thousand cells all vote as one,
Population code — the real work's done,
How they blend is the puzzle we chase,
Three dialects talking the very same space.
[Chorus]
Nobody knows, nobody knows, let the question grow,
Rate and timing, population flow,
Nobody knows, nobody knows,
Hold the mystery, steady and slow,
Count the spikes or clock them right,
Or poll the crowd mid-synaptic flight,
That's the neural code, three ciphers, one wire,
Science keeps on knocking at the neuron's choir.
[Verse 3]
Sorrells looked close with two-thousand-eighteen eyes,
Said the hippocampus stops, no new tries,
Boldrini checked brains from that very same year,
Found baby neurons sprouting, crystal clear,
Same organ, two papers, opposite creed,
Does the seahorse-shaped memory garden reseed?
Nobody's certain, the biopsy's thin,
That's a question still growing within.
[Verse 4]
Glia used to be glue, just packing and paste,
Now some say they compute, nothing's a waste,
Astrocytes whisper in calcium waves,
Maybe they're thinking in ways neurons don't save,
And why does the brain need a thousand-plus kinds,
Baskets and chandeliers, pyramid minds?
Each shape a dialect, a different voice,
Diversity's purpose — still an open choice.
[Bridge]
Can a circuit dream up a self that feels?
Can silicon echo what the cortex reveals?
We build our networks, we tune every weight,
But awareness won't show on the readout plate,
Maybe it's layers, maybe it's loops,
Maybe it's something no model yet groups,
Consciousness hides in the space in between,
The hardest open question the brain has seen.
[Chorus]
Nobody knows, nobody knows, let the question grow,
Rate and timing, population flow,
Nobody knows, nobody knows,
Hold the mystery, steady and slow,
Count the spikes or clock them right,
Or poll the crowd mid-synaptic flight,
That's the neural code, three ciphers, one wire,
Science keeps on knocking at the neuron's choir.
[Outro]
Engram, glia, the code, the birth of a cell,
Consciousness ringing like a cortical bell,
We don't have the answers, just better guesses,
Keep asking the brain till it confesses.