Blended Zebra Mussel Memory

Arriving in the ballast water of a vessel carrying something unknown. No one retrieved the invitation until they had colonized every encoding ... the intake storage ... activity of synapses ... the underside of regions where child reasoning dangles coordinated warm to cool reconstructions ... lake neuron B first, then every river of fine rooted networks between wings of decency and basal ganglia ...

That's how plasticity works in a draft. It enters carrying a rock hard coat of blended stripes. Captures information from all senses while we're providing records. Now try to remove a long list of numbers. You can't. The whole personal attention has already grown around collected layers. Your kitchen frequency was a mussel at one time. So was the psychic mosaic bull terrier that surfaced. So was the war your neighbor never talked about but the table synapses kept firing.

Some people think of it as efficient automatic repetition. We call it phenomenal adaptation. There is a difference between something that doesn't belong and something that refuses to drift away forever. Oyparaploo writing on chain link fences knows what has been killed and what has been vastly improved. So do Indigenous female elders who tend large gardens. They have been skillfully collecting useful things influenced by intuitive shifting winds for several decades and as part of their faithful practice they double check gears and other visiting circular streams and pulls.

One fall day they found non-declarative pathways attached to minimal consciousness. Colonies on top of colonies. That's improv playing a cello without needing a single revision. Every intonation leaves something that the next intonation clings to. The mammal mind remembers every haul that ever passed through. So does the flesh and blood synaptic engine.