[Verse 1] Picture the pyramid, CA1 holds its ground, Branches split upward, two territories found, Far end kissing layer three, entorhinal thread, That's the distal tuft where the present tense is fed, Closer to the soma, a proximal domain, CA3 wiring in through the Schaffer lane, Same cell, two mailboxes, different senders call, Distal reads the now, proximal reads it all. [Chorus] Distal says "here's what I'm seeing," Proximal says "here's what you've been," When the branches disagree, plateau lights the scene, Comparator wiring, prediction meets machine, CA3's the memory, EC's the current stream, Coincidence unlocks the gate when both agree they've seen. [Verse 2] Bittner ran the patch clamp, watched the calcium soar, One dendritic plateau and the place field's not the same no more, Not a hundred paired spikes, not some slow Hebbian crawl, A single big depolarization rewrites the whole recall, Distal EC lands a jolt, wakes the tuft up quick, Proximal ramp from CA3 keeps the voltage in the mix, Stack the timing tight enough, the two domains combine, Potentiate the synapse, a fresh place field crosses the line. [Chorus] Distal says "here's what I'm seeing," Proximal says "here's what you've been," When the branches disagree, plateau lights the scene, Comparator wiring, prediction meets machine, CA3's the memory, EC's the current stream, Coincidence unlocks the gate when both agree they've seen. [Verse 3] Lisman and Grace call this neuron the referee, Weighing CA3's guess against whatever EC lets it see, CA3's an autoassociate, completion is its game, Pulls a whole memory back from a fragment of the frame, EC layer three's the courier of raw, unfiltered fact, Match the two, confirmation, no alarms, no counterattack, Mismatch, though, the cell throws up a novelty flare, Telling the whole hippocampus something's different there. [Bridge] Now shift one wall three inches, swap the lamp out for a jar, CA3 still hums the old room like it never moved that far, Reality from EC brings the new geometry in, Distal dendrite disagrees with proximal's twin, Plateau potential fires right where the conflict lives, Synaptic weights recalibrate, the old map forgives, Place field drifts a fraction, remapping takes the floor, Comparator keeps learning — reality wins the score. [Chorus] Distal says "here's what I'm seeing," Proximal says "here's what you've been," When the branches disagree, plateau lights the scene, Comparator wiring, prediction meets machine, CA3's the memory, EC's the current stream, Coincidence unlocks the gate when both agree they've seen. [Outro] Proximal is memory, distal is the scene, Coincidence decides what the hippocampus deems, Familiar, foreign, or a little bit betwixt, CA1's the judge that keeps both signals fixed.
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