A Nervous System, Relaxing

the C. elegans connectome · real wiring

This is the near-complete wiring of a real animal — the ~300 neurons of C. elegans, their synapses, and the muscles they drive — 399 cells in all, ~300 of them neurons — the only nervous system humanity has fully mapped. Our relaxation-labeling engine sorts the cells into functional communities from the wiring alone; then we model brain activity as the same relaxation, spreading from a sensory stimulus through the true synapses until it reaches the muscles. Click any node to stimulate it and watch the thought propagate.

What's real. The neurons, synapses and gap junctions are the measured C. elegans connectome (OpenWorm / Cook et al. 2019). The communities come from our engine — relaxation labeling as a mean-field over the wiring's modularity — scoring Newman modularity , on par with the standard networkx detector. The activity is a relaxation/spreading model on the real adjacency: a ← 0.82·a + 0.6·(·a) from a clamped sensory stimulus. Honest limit: real neurons fire with ion-channel dynamics and signs (excitatory/inhibitory) this simplified model omits — it shows how structure shapes the flow of activity, not spike-accurate firing. But the wiring it flows through is exactly the animal's.

The command interneurons AVA/AVB and PVC sit at the hubs — the real circuit that decides forward vs. backward crawling.

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