[Verse 1] Nineteen seventy-five, Mountcastle took the stage, said the parietal cortex runs a command apparatus, turned the page — not just a map of skin and space, it's the general plotting out the body's chase through extrapersonal territory, charting where to reach, headquarters for action, hiding past the speech. [Chorus] Scheitellappen, du bist der Dreh- und Angelpunkt, where attention and intention share a single stunt, Ist es der Blick, der die Bühne bereitet? Oder die Hand, die den Plan schon leitet? Gottlieb and Bisley-Goldberg called out: "Halt! Priority map" — das ist die Gestalt. [Verse 2] Colby and Goldberg mapped the eye's own gaze, lateral intraparietal, attention's blazing maze — spatial representation, salience rides the beam, while Andersen and Buneo dreamed a different scheme: gain fields mixing posture, eye, and hand, effector-specific intention, a parallel command. Reach map, gaze map, each one holds its claim, same cortex, different vectors — parietal's game. [Chorus] Scheitellappen, du bist der Dreh- und Angelpunkt, where attention and intention share a single stunt, Ist es der Blick, der die Bühne bereitet? Oder die Hand, die den Plan schon leitet? Gottlieb and Bisley-Goldberg called out: "Halt! Priority map" — das ist die Gestalt. [Verse 3] Goodale and Milner split the brain in two, ventral stream for naming, dorsal stream for what you do — grab the mug before you've even named its hue, vision-for-action, the blind can reach on cue. Kravitz took that pathway, carved it into three, grasping, gazing, memory — a branching family tree, parieto-premotor, prefrontal, and medial line, the dorsal stream's an output river, forking three at a time. [Verse 4] Cabeza reviewed the ventral side, where memory meets recall, Humphreys and Lambon Ralph propose a buffer holding all — fusion and fission, the mind's own working glue, stitching fragments of a thought till something fits the view. Seghier calls the angular gyrus a palimpsest of thought — one scrap of cortex, scribbled over, many functions caught: semantics, numbers, minds of others, stacked and layered true, Freedman and Ibos found it sorting choices, flexible and new, categorizing cues, learning rules as they unfold — parietal's a judge now, not just a hand to hold. [Verse 5] Harvey, Coen, and Tank watched a mouse in a virtual maze, sequences of choice-specific firing, blazing trails through days. Raposo, Kaufman, Churchland mixed the senses in one bin — promiscuous neurons, loosely wed to every sense, loyal to none within. Licata showed the rodent patch is choosy after all, needed more for seeing than for hearing's call. Is rat PPC our LIP, our cousin 'cross the tree? Homology's still arguing — the jury's not yet free. [Bridge] Attention oder Intention — welche Theorie gewinnt? Vielleicht sind's beide Karten, die dasselbe Terrain beginnt, priority's the password — grab it, gaze it, plan the limb, ein Scheitellappen, tausend Jobs, nie nur eine Hymn'.
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