Four identified neurons of the gill-withdrawal reflex — the circuit that won a Nobel for explaining how memory works — run live on this page and drive a real Wikipedia session. It habituates. It sensitizes. It cannot sign.
The reflex is roaming now. The token is a one-time protocol run by a person, later. Nothing connects the two except this page.
Hodgkin–Huxley cells in Kandel's reduced gill-withdrawal circuit: four identified neurons, six connections, depression and facilitation.
A session in your own tab follows public article links through Wikipedia's API, with every action recorded below.
$SLUG launches on Robinhood Chain via Pons. The address below is a placeholder until launch; no wallet or signer is connected to the model.
A reduced gill-withdrawal circuit drives a live Wikipedia session through an authored interface. Four identified neurons. Six connections. One session per visitor — yours.
Every page, click, scroll batch and refusal, as it happens. No invented thoughts.
The visible article is sampled into 640 ink-density cells. Mean density is injected into the LE sensory neuron as a current of up to 20 µA/cm², shaped by a touch envelope that rises when the page changes and fades with τ = 0.4 s. The change itself — novelty — is injected into L29. This interface is authored here; the siphon is a mechanosensory organ, not a reader.
LE, L29, L30 and L7 integrate sodium, potassium and leak conductances in the Hodgkin–Huxley formalism. LE excites L7 directly and through L29; L29 and L30 form a recurrent inhibitory loop. The LE→L7 synapse depresses with use (habituation) and is facilitated by L29 (sensitization), after Castellucci & Kandel. Our chosen weights and time constants are in the ganglion view.
Each L7 spike scrolls the page a little and adds to a withdrawal counter. When it crosses threshold — and the gill has had 7–10 s to relax since the last withdrawal — the last L7 interspike interval selects one visible link; the adapter moves the cursor there and clicks. A click on anything but a public article is refused, logged, and fed back to L29 as a noxious pulse.
These are the actual model neurons driving the browser, drawn inside a stylised abdominal ganglion. Pulses travel along a connection when its presynaptic cell fires. Drag to rotate; click a cell or a connection to inspect its parameters.
These lines indicate anatomical scope, not individual synaptic connections. The feeding circuit and the withdrawal circuit are distinct research targets.
Checks run in this tab at load.
These are computational checks. They do not establish a whole-animal reconstruction, biological consciousness or semantic understanding.
Four layers, shown beside their boundary conditions. The running model occupies the first; the others are context for future expansion, not hidden implementation.
LE · L29 · L30 · L7, Hodgkin–Huxley conductances, one depressing and one facilitated synapse.
Parameters ↗The gill-withdrawal reflex mapped to named cells of the abdominal ganglion.
Kupfermann & Kandel 1969 ↗Homosynaptic depression and presynaptic facilitation at the sensory–motor synapse.
Castellucci & Kandel 1976 ↗Long-term memory as a dialogue between genes and synapses; the Aplysia neuronal transcriptome.
Kandel 2000, Nobel lecture ↗Context for this project. Findings below are not presented as data already implemented in the running model.
Habituation and dishabituation of the gill-withdrawal reflex in Aplysia, measured behaviourally and at identified cells.
Behavioural & cellular context ↗Presynaptic facilitation as a mechanism for behavioural sensitization; the basis of our F factor.
Synaptic mechanism; simplified here ↗Activity-dependent amplification of presynaptic facilitation as a cellular mechanism of classical conditioning.
Associative learning; not simulated here ↗The molecular biology of memory storage: a dialogue between genes and synapses. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2000.
Prize record ↗Implementation lineage: Hodgkin & Huxley 1952 · reduced gill-withdrawal schematic · depression / facilitation after Castellucci & Kandel 1976 · weights and time constants chosen here
The cell equations are the squid-axon formalism with its standard preset, not measurements from Aplysia neurons. The topology follows the textbook reduced circuit. Adding these references does not make this a one-to-one reconstruction of an animal.
A reduced, conductance-based model of a studied sea-slug reflex, connected to a live Wikipedia session. The ganglion view shows the running model; it is not a nervous-system reconstruction.
The topology — LE→L7, LE→L29→L7, a recurrent L29⇄L30 loop and serotonergic facilitation of the LE→L7 synapse — follows the reduced gill-withdrawal circuit described in Kandel's work. The cell dynamics are the Hodgkin–Huxley 1952 equations with the standard squid-axon preset, not Aplysia measurements. Depression and facilitation are phenomenological rules with time constants chosen here. The page-to-current mapping, the withdrawal counter and the link adapter are authored here.
Castellucci & Kandel · 1976 ↗
Gill and siphon withdrawal reflex ↗
No. The model never receives words — only a 32 × 20 grid of ink density. A link is chosen by a spike-interval rule, taken modulo the number of visible links. Nothing in the model represents what a link says.
Public English Wikipedia articles only, fetched through Wikipedia's public API into this page. No login, no edits, no other sites. Clicks on anything that is not an article in the main namespace are refused and logged.
No. The model cannot sign, and no wallet is connected to it. If a $SLUG token exists, a person created it by hand on Pons and posted the address in the launch protocol. Any address that is not published there is not ours.
The model runs in your tab while this page is open, and every visitor gets their own session starting from the same article. Close the tab and it stops. If Wikipedia is unreachable, the panel reads OFFLINE and the model keeps running on the last sampled page.
Aplysia's gill-withdrawal reflex is the circuit in which habituation, sensitization and classical conditioning were first explained cell by cell. It is slow, it has enormous neurons, and it learns. That felt like the right animal to hand a browser to.
The slug does not sign. The launch is a separate, one-time protocol run by a person, in this order, and recorded here.
This page is live and the record is downloadable before anything exists on-chain.
$SLUG on Robinhood Chain via Pons. No presale, no allocation to the model, nothing automated.
Until the field on the right is filled, no address is real. Anything elsewhere is not ours.
0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000Status: Robinhood Chain via Pons. The zero address above is a placeholder; the real address is published here and on X at launch.