Root & Bone

Lyrics

[Intro]

In the chill of that McGill basement, winter 1947,
I trace your edges, old notebook,
leather worn like grandfather's hands.

[Verse 1]
Donald Hebb, you sat here at 45,
bundled in wool against the 10-degree cold,
sketching pathways that fire together,
wire together, like roots digging deep
into the bone of what came before.
Your coffee rings stain the pages,
1949, bitter black brew fueling nights
when the EEG hums low, wires tangled
as family lines I never mapped.

[Chorus]
Oh, notebook, you hold the roots and bone,
neuroplastic threads pulling from ancestors' strength.
Marian Diamond would nod, at 40 in '66,
her Ford Model A parked under eucalyptus,
saying the brain's a muscle, use it or lose it,
like tending soil where old bones rest.
Roots and bone, rewiring us whole.

[Verse 2]
I press my fingers to your spine,
feel the musty odor mixed with disinfectant,
sharp in the flickering fluorescent light.
Hebb's quote echoes: neurons firing,
wiring the resilience we inherit,
from unnamed assistants in Berkeley labs,
their late hours feeding rats in mazes,
invisible hands shaping what endures.

[Bridge]

And that small strange fact, Einstein's brain
in Diamond's hatbox, traveling roads
like forgotten kin carrying genius forward.
What gaps in the record, personal setbacks
overcome in silence, roots twisting deeper.

[Verse 3]
At 3 AM, under the microscope's cool metal,
she hears rat claws skittering,
scratch of pen on graph paper,
proving enrichment alters structure,
like ancestral whispers in our cortex,
root and bone, the tether to survive.

[Chorus]
Oh, notebook, you hold the roots and bone,
neuroplastic threads pulling from ancestors' strength.
Marian Diamond would nod, at 40 in '66,
her Ford Model A parked under eucalyptus,
saying the brain's a muscle, use it or lose it,
like tending soil where old bones rest.
Roots and bone, rewiring us whole.

[Outro]

In this lab's hum, I address you, old friend,
roots and bone, our gilded synapse.