20151101 (neuroscience)

Evolutionary theory tells us it’s

No surprise whale newborns know

How to swim the ones who don't

Die off before reproducing or

That fawns horses soon run walk

For the same reason neural paths

For balance motion wriggling

In water must be inhered in the 

Genetic material passed on

Babes don’t even stumble about

Until months after not that our 

Legs could support us so we think

Those paths form from random

Movements though that’s not 

Proven neuronal channels exist

‘Twixt the muscles control centers 

Without coordination that hand eye 

Thing that’s so much fun to watch 

Develop in our young then fine 

Motor skills like picking up 

Shards of a vase knocked off 

An end table while learning to walk 

We’re nowhere able to fend off

Wolves or tongue-kisses of those

Slathering hounds we keep about

As doorbells bedwarmers tricksters

Who perform as instructed long

Before we can steady on our feet 

Our puppyhood is years in the making

So more complex dogs don’t 

Eventually speak English nor will

Cats do simple math you’ll waste 

Your time reading stories to pigs 

Even if all the characters are pigs 

But children can grasp dogs as

Characters as easily as children 

Whom they’ve never met in

Tales from which they learn not

To trust wolves even if they’re

Wearing grandma’s clothes

Elbows we think don’t think

About elbows or marvel of their

Flexions twists but brains have

Been thinking about brains since

God knows when perhaps when 

Oog first bashed Moog in the head 

Changed him drastically but unlike

Cain didn’t kill him or at least since

Phineas Gage in Vermont in 1848

Blew a dynamite tamping bar 

Through his cranium lived years to

Tell of it although we have known

Cave peoples had been trephining

Each others’ skulls in prehistory

In 1954 Doctor Robert Galbraith

Heath implanted electrodes into the 

Pleasure centers of his patient’s brain

With a button the subject would 

Electrically stimulate it as many

As fifteen hundred times in three hours 

Complained begged for more when

It was disconnected years earlier mice

Hooked up similarly starved to death

Rather than give up the trigger

Somewhere in laboratories stuff

This fascinating must still be done

But except for a reference to CIA

Military research I haven’t found it

c. J.S.Manista, 2015