Okay, what are you, tiny thing near the broken place?  You're big enough to see at the end of a thread, so you're not a neuron.  You're small enough that a particular spike-train is a key part of your state.  You look to Melody like a disintegrating thread leading into the big void, and to the extent Mindhealing shows state in terms of how it affects activity, you are what happens to a thought just before it goes perbluckit.  You have structure besides that spike train, but it is not something so blatantly obvious to a Civilization-trained amateur who's taken a few neuroscience courses as the concept of a particular temporal pattern of neural spikes...

Thellim echoes some of this questioning to Melody, in case Melody's Gift is telling her more.

Okay, what are you, tiny thing near the broken place?  You're big enough to see at the end of a thread, so you're not a neuron.  You're small enough that a particular spike-train is a key part of your state.  You look to Melody like a disintegrating thread leading into the big void, and to the extent Mindhealing shows state in terms of how it affects activity, you are what happens to a thought just before it goes perbluckit.  You have structure besides that spike train; but it is not something so blatantly obvious to a Civilization-trained amateur who's taken a few neuroscience courses, as the concept of a particular temporal pattern of neural spikes...

Thellim echoes some of this questioning to Melody, in case Melody's Gift is telling her more.