The inspiration for the name "Jangly Ganglia" came from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. The following passage made me go into convulsive giggle fits on a plane ride home from a conference. You’ve got to love anyone who can combine biological nerdery with a description of the protagonist lying on the floor after being punched in the face for hitting on a girl in a imperfectly understood foreign language. All within the context of information technology nerdery, and with the kind of jaunty tone that I can never get enough of:

Some sort of commotion is happening up in that remote plane of most people’s heads, five to six feet above the floor, where social interaction traditionally takes place. Mary’s date is being hustled off to the side by a large powerful fellow—it is hard to recognize faces at this angle, but a good candidate would be Rod. Rod is shouting in Qwghlmian. Actually, everyone is shouting in Qwghlmian—even the ones who are speaking English—because Waterhouse’s speech-recognition centers have a bad case of jangly ganglia. Best to leave that fancy stuff for later, and concentrate on more basic phylogenesis: it would be nice, for example, to be a vertebrate again. After that, quadrupedal locomotion might come in handy.

A perky Qwghlmian-Australian fellow in an RAAF uniform steps up and grabs his right anterior fin, jerking him up the evolutionary ladder before he’s ready [...]

Ever since I read that passage, I think of my depression as a bad case of jangly ganglia. The nerves in my head just aren't making the connections they're supposed to.

So I named this project after that passage, and dedicated it to my serotonin, the little chemicals that can move me back up the evolutionary ladder.