MetaTime v36 and Neurocognitive Boundary Conditions: A Variational Bookkeeping Framework for Extreme Morphological Sparsity, Paradoxical Lucidity, Acquired Savantism, Planarian Memory, and Physarum Morpho-Computation

Several “edge” observations in cognition and morpho-computation appear to decouple behavioral
performance from naive anatomical or substrate proxies: (i) preserved everyday function under extreme
cortical thinning in long-standing hydrocephalus, (ii) paradoxical/terminal lucidity near endof-
life in severe dementia, (iii) rare emergence of savant-like skills after focal injury, (iv) persistence
of learned responses across head regeneration in planaria, and (v) network optimization by the acellular
slime mold Physarum polycephalum. This companion note exports the bookkeeping discipline
of MetaTime v36—a two-channel separation between a correlational reservoir (Latency) and a dissipative
execution channel (Execution)—into an operational neurocognitive setting. We formalize a
constrained action functional on an effective causal graph G, provide a minimal dynamical toy model
for Latency/Execution variables defined on graph edges, and propose four falsification-oriented neuro
kill-tests (N1–N4): (N1) energy-budget accounting, (N2) no-signaling/causality, (N3) boundedness
of graph-complexity observables under perturbation, and (N4) preregistered reconstruction with outof-
sample validation. The goal is not to posit new physics, but to define measurable discriminants
that can convert anecdote-prone domains into testable programs.