[Verse 1] Down from the parietal ridge a signal rides the wire, Striatum waiting in the dark — body, tail, and dorsal fire, Caudate and putamen both receive the climbing spark, Yeterian and Pandya charted every hidden arc. Nineteen eighty-five, Goldman-Rakic and Selemon found Prefrontal fibers lacing through, interdigitating, wound Like fingers of two hands that never quite agree, Parietal and frontal laced in strange symmetry. [Chorus] Loop it down, loop it back, cortex talks in circuits, Striatum, colliculus, cerebellum — work it! Layer five to midbrain, pons to vermis tree, Every station's a letter in the brain's own loop-de-glee. Closed loops, closed loops, nothing lost in space, The parietal cortex keeps its signal laced. [Verse 2] LIP's layer five, the deep and sturdy kind, Sends its axons plunging to the colliculus behind, Lynch and Graybiel, Lobeck too, in eighty-five they drew the line, Then Paré and Wurtz lit the cells with antidromic shine — Ninety-seven, shocking from below to prove the thread, Visual, memory, presaccadic, braided in one thread. Before the eye has even jumped the colliculus can tell, The parietal whisper already rang its bell. [Verse 3] Now follow the river to the pontine gray below, Glickstein in eighty-five watched cortico-pontine flow, Schmahmann and Pandya mapped the mossy fiber's call, Visual-spatial cargo bound for cerebellum's hall. The vermis and the hemispheres receive the parietal mail, Granule cells and Purkinje spines interpret every trail, Balance meets attention where the climbing fibers ring, A silent cerebellar judge correcting everything. [Bridge] Clower, West, Lynch and Strick, two thousand and one, Traced the virus backward where the synapses run, Area seven-a, disynaptic, listening in To dentate nucleus, colliculus, hippocampal kin. Prevosto, Graf, Ugolini — rabies hopping free, Climbing cerebellar, striatal roads to LIP and 7a's tree. Claustrum, zona incerta, brainstem's oculomotor crew, Damage any station and the whole map stutters through. [Chorus] Loop it down, loop it back, cortex talks in circuits, Striatum, colliculus, cerebellum — work it! Layer five to midbrain, pons to vermis tree, Every station's a letter in the brain's own loop-de-glee. Closed loops, closed loops, nothing lost in space, The parietal cortex keeps its signal laced. [Outro] Bruise the dentate, bruise the hill of the colliculus too, Parietal symptoms surface like the loop ran clean through — Not one cortex working, but a circuit singing wide, Striatum, colliculus, cerebellum, side by side.
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