Stimpunks Foundation · L★S · Field Guide No. 7

A Field Guide to
Nervous Systems

Eleven ways to have a nervous system — the companion catalogue to Every Nervous System (Zine No. 27). A centreless net, a mind spread through eight arms, a whole life on 302 neurons, a slime mold that thinks with none at all. Neuroscience hides verdicts in its words — "primitive," "simple," "lower." The animal kingdom keeps no standard nervous system.

L★S
How to use this guide Each entry gives an animal, the architecture of its nervous system, how an anthropocentric reading misreads it ("sounds like / actually"), and full field notes. Click any entry to open its notes.
No standard nervous system We keep measuring every nervous system against ours and calling the distance "deficit." But there is no default brain to fall short of — only many architectures, each whole, each tuned to a body and a world.
On the diagrams Each schematic maps where the processing lives — massed in a brain, strung along a cord, spread through a body, or netted with no centre at all. Same question every time; a different answer.
Not: Not primitive — a centreless net is a working nervous system, older than brains. Not simple — 302 neurons run a whole life; a pinhead plans. Not a ladder — more neurons isn't "higher," and ours isn't the top. Not a deficit — a sense we lack is a whole world they have. Not the standard — there is no standard nervous system, ours included.
Star stuff, sensing

Every nervous system here is built from the same star-forged atoms and fires on the same sodium and potassium — the universe wired up to feel itself, in ten thousand architectures, no two ever the same. This is the catalogue behind Every Nervous System (No. 27): difference isn't the exception in the animal kingdom — it is the animal kingdom.