MetaTime and Cognitive Anomalies: A Processing–Action Account of Terminal Lucidity, Acquired Savantism, Planarian Memory, and Physarum Computation (v36-aligned Companion Note)

Reports of unexpected cognitive performance in extreme biological conditions—including paradoxical/terminal lucidity in severe dementia, rare cases of acquired savant skills after focal injury,memory persistence across head regeneration in planaria, and near-optimal network design by theacellular slime mold Physarum polycephalum—pose a shared explanatory challenge: how can robustfunction emerge when the apparent computational substrate is degraded, rewired, or absent? Thiscompanion paper reframes these phenomena within the MetaTime v36.0 bookkeeping, which decomposescomputation into a correlational reservoir (Latency, ρL; reusable constraints/priors) anda dissipative execution channel (Execution, ρI ; inference/control cost), and introduces a constrainedprocessing action principle (PCAM) that penalizes thermodynamic cost while enforcing causal closure.Cognition is modeled as an operational causal graph G supported by—but not identical to—itsEuclidean embedding. We argue that slow deformation, disinhibition, or regenerative morphodynamicscan preserve or re-access high-connectivity latent structure while transiently reallocating theexecution budget. We propose falsifiable predictions and minimal “neuro kill-tests” (energy-budgetconsistency, no-signaling, boundedness, and prospective reconstruction) that parallel the numericalsanity checks emphasized in MetaTime v36.0.