A large attraction of neural systems lies in their promise of replacing programming by learning. A problem with many current neural models is that with realistically large input patterns learning time explodes. This is a problem inherent in a notion of learning that is based almost entirely on statistical estimation. We propose here a different learning style where significant relations in the input pattern are recognized and expressed by the unsupervised self-organization of dynamic links. The power of this mechanism is due to the very general a priori principle of conservation of topological structure. We demonstrate that style with a system that learns to classify mirror symmetric pixel patterns from single examples.