How Does Memory Work?

Close your eyes and picture a cake — The candles, the smile, the slice you'd take! Where was that picture? Where did it hide? Tucked in your skull on the squishy inside!

Inside your head live ZILLIONS of cells — Tiny noodles ringing tinier bells! NEURONS! NEURONS! Passing the spark — Lighting up patterns in the dark!

When something happens — POP, CRACK, ZAP! — A bunch of neurons all fire on the map! The cells that fired together that day Built a little PATH for the spark to stay!

The path gets stronger, click by click — That's the trick! That's the trick! You don't STORE the cake on a shelf — You re-LIGHT the pattern, all by yourself!

Neurons fire — pattern glows! Same path lights up — the memory glows! A memory's a path your brain re-runs — Sparkles where the spark once was!

Every time you remember the cake, Your brain re-LIGHTS the path it makes — A little new with every spark — Each return rewrites the dark!

Two kids at the very same party Remember it fuzzy, remember it arty — Each brain re-fires its own little show — A copy of a copy of the glow!

How do we know? How do we know? A scientist named Eric Kandel said so! He studied a SEA SLUG, big and slow, With BIG fat neurons he could WATCH grow!

He tickled the slug — TAP — on its skin! The slug pulled back, then settled in! He tapped it again — and again — and again — Until the cells built a stronger CHAIN!

Two cells reached out — they made a bridge! Now the slug remembered on the very next twitch! Memory wasn't ghosts in a jar — It was CELLS getting stronger, near and far!

Neurons fire — pattern glows! Same path lights up — the memory glows! A slug, a kid, a grandma's tale — The pattern in the cells lights up the trail!

So tonight when you close your eyes to sleep, And the day's pictures flicker, soft and deep, Tiny lights inside your head Are firing the patterns of what you said!