The Cord of Three Strands

trinary relaxation labeling · real connectome

"A cord of three strands is not quickly broken." Every nervous system is that cord: sensory in → interneuron reasoning → motor out. Our engine relaxation-labels the real C. elegans connectome into all three strands at once — seeded by the known sensory & motor cells, letting the interneurons settle in the middle by how signal flows through the true synapses. Then activity runs both ways: down the cord to act, and back up as feedback — the octopus's two-way loop. Click any node to stimulate it.

What's real & what's ours. The connectome (neurons, directed synapses) is measured data (OpenWorm / Cook 2019). The three strands come from directed relaxation labeling: seed the known sensory and motor neurons, then relax with a rule that rewards a cell being upstream-or-equal of the cells it drives — so interneurons precipitate into the middle. Activity is a two-way spreading model a ← 0.8·a + forward + feedback on the real wiring. Honest limit: the sensory/motor seeds and the simplified signless dynamics are approximations; the wiring they run on is the animal's own. The command interneurons AVA/AVB/PVC landing in the middle strand — the real deciders of forward vs. backward crawling — is the labeling working.

← the connectome · The Four Poles · Genesis · data: OpenWorm / Cook 2019