The Moving Baseline (Adaptation)

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
In this cluttered lab at McGill, Montreal, 1949,
I hold you, worn lab notebook,
your pages yellowed like old graph paper,
showing spike rates from those late nights.
Donald Hebb, forty-five then,
scribbled in you with a blunt pencil,
neurons that fire together, he wrote,
wire together, in the chill of 18 degrees Celsius.

[Chorus]
Oh, my notebook, the baseline moves,
what shocked us once now hums familiar,
like that metallic tang in the air,
mixed with musty books at 2 AM.
Adapting, always adapting,
the brain recalibrates its normal,
David Hubel knew it, in '81,
the visual system shifting quietly.

[Verse 2]
Remember when Hebb shocked himself,
with the microelectrode, gloveless hands numb,
a tiny lightning bolt of thought, he called it,
in your margins, a strange fact etched.
The oscilloscope burned insulation,
bitter scent filling the unheated room,
wool sweaters not enough against the cold.

[Chorus]
Oh, my notebook, the baseline moves,
what shocked us once now hums familiar,
like that metallic tang in the air,
mixed with musty books at 2 AM.
Adapting, always adapting,
the brain recalibrates its normal,
David Hubel knew it, in '81,
the visual system shifting quietly.

[Bridge]

In Buddhist terms, impermanence whispers,
Greek stoics nod to the flux,
but here, in your pages, it's science,
sensory anchors in a winter night,
the feel of sticky metal electrodes,
recalibrating what we call home.

[Verse 3]
Hubel and Wiesel's cats in '62,
visual cortex bending to input,
your logs hold their echoes,
unnamed assistants in the shadows,
staff, they called them, gaps in the record.
But you remember, notebook,
the humidity unnoted, noise levels guessed.

[Outro]

The moving baseline, my dear notebook,
we adapt, we wire, we let go.
From Hebb's bike in the snow outside,
to the coffee mug chipped on the bench,
all shifting, all sighing perfect.