Some Pattern That I Used to Know

Lyrics

[Intro]

Donald, your words from July 22, 1904, to that August day in '85,
still whisper in this cracked spine.

[Verse 1]
I hold you, old book, 'The Organization of Behavior', 1949 edition,
pages yellowed like Montreal's winter light filtering through McGill's basement windows.
That chilly 10 degrees Celsius, formaldehyde biting the air,
while your ideas fired across my neurons.
Neurons that fire together, you said, wire together.
I trace the spine, feel the cracks where assistants' hands wore you down.

[Chorus]
Some pattern that I used to know,
looping back at 2:00 AM in the dim lab glow.
Hebb's rule etched in my cortex,
rewiring what was broken, what I let go.
Marian would nod, her microscope slides from '65,
stained with Nissl, showing growth in the gray.

[Verse 2]
Remember the EEG machine humming beside you,
paper rolling out jagged lines like forgotten bicycle paths in the snow.
Black coffee stains on page 47, where the quote lives.
Those sensory deprivation tanks in the '50s,
students floating, hallucinating childhood toys,
their names lost, but the patterns return.
Diamond's rats in enriched cages, cortical thickness blooming.

[Bridge]

Oh, book, you're my tool, my quiet lover in the night.
Addressing you now, close-miked, breath to paper.
The small strange fact: a student saw a red wagon from 1932,
floating in the dark tank, pulling old wires tight.

[Verse 3]
From McGill's cluttered chalkboards to Berkeley's sunlit benches,
your metaphor holds: the brain as muscle, strengthening.
I used to know this loop, frayed but gilding now with gold.
November 11, 1926, Marian born, to July 25, 2017,
her age 39 when she proved it all.

[Chorus]
Some pattern that I used to know,
looping back at 2:00 AM in the dim lab glow.
Hebb's rule etched in my cortex,
rewiring what was broken, what I let go.
Marian would nod, her microscope slides from '65,
stained with Nissl, showing growth in the gray.

[Outro]

You're still here, pattern, in the synapse's quiet repair.
Donald, Marian, the wiring endures.