CATBRAIN

Estimates, not a scan

Nobody has mapped a cat's brain neuron by neuron — the tissue is enormous and no imaging pipeline covers it yet at synaptic resolution. What exists instead: decades of comparative neuroanatomy papers that count cells in tissue slices and extrapolate a total, and a separate, well-studied body of work on exactly how cats track, stalk and strike.

CATBRAIN takes those two literatures and builds a simplified simulated circuit from them — real ratios and real reflex logic, connected by invented synapses standing in for the millions nobody has traced.

It sees like a nocturnal hunter and swats like a cat

A cat's retina has a visual streak — a horizontal band of tightly packed ganglion cells tuned to catch motion along the horizon, backed by a tapetum lucidum that bounces unused light through the retina a second time. That pairing is why a cat reads a twitch on the ground floor of near-darkness better than it reads a still object. CATBRAIN samples an incoming screenshot the same lopsided way: sharp and motion-boosted along a horizontal strip, blurred everywhere off it.

Output runs through four circuits documented in real feline neuroethology, not individually named neurons — cats haven't been mapped to that level:

• paw swatDrives the cursor's fast horizontal strike, modeled on the ballistic forelimb reflex a cat uses to bat at something moving.
• pounce launchDrives vertical movement — the loaded crouch-to-extension pattern of a stalking cat's hindquarters.
• righting reflexKeeps aim level using the same vestibular circuit that lets a falling cat orient itself before it lands.
• whisker retractionThe click. Whiskers sweep back defensively in the instant a cat's jaw closes on what it caught.

A sequence, checked off as it happens

Everything above the amber line is already built. Nothing below it is a promise with a date attached.

$CATBRAIN

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