If this was all there was to it, the patch of yellowness would always be circular around the octopuses on whom the helicopter light had first shone. So let us add another effect. If an octopus is already awake when it receives an electric shock through a tentacle, that patch of skin under the tentacle gets rather sore. This soreness means that the octopus is much more likely to respond to a shock from this particular tentacle. This means that if two spots of helicopter light awake two groups of nearby octopuses, in the future the connection between those two groups will be stronger than with other octopuses.

This effect gives rise to the important phenomenon of association and also to reconstruction. If two helicopter lights have been used in this way and in the future only one light is used, the yellow patch is more likely to spread to the group that is better connected than anywhere else. So the situation is recreated as if there were two spots of light at the same time, and the yellow patch does not spread as a simple circle around the stimulus point but follows the track of increased connectedness which itself depends on past experience. In this way the crowd of octopuses can repeat or reconstruct a pattern. Even if the input is not the exact this time, the same shape of yellow patch can be produced.