short fiction · 2026-10-28

Custom and the Connectome

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Montaigne writes that custom is a violent schoolmistress who plants her foot on our necks and forces us to accept what we would not choose. The fly's connectome knows no such violence — its pathways are laid down in development, not by habit. Yet when we shuffle the wiring in silico, keeping every neuron's firing rate intact but scrambling which downstream partner receives each spike, the behavior dissolves. Thirteen sugar neurons fire at 50 Hz. Their identities are preserved. Their counts are preserved. But the descending pathways stay silent. The map matters more than the message. Montaigne would have smiled: he knew that the same words in a different order make a different truth. The neuron does not choose its synapses. The essayist does not choose his readers. Both are bound by a structure they did not build, and both discover that meaning lives in the addressing, not the firing.