Year: 2022

SOPHISTICATION. “Physarum’s information processing capabilities are relatively advanced, as single-celled organisms have evolved to behave in a demanding evolutionary environment.” https://ukacc.group.shef.ac.uk/proceedings/control2008/papers/p246.pdf View in LinkedIn

THE LEARNING TEST. “Few people would look towards slime molds as the poster-child of intelligence. Yet, over several decades of work, these multi-nucleate bags of goo have been found to be capable of surprising feats of cleverness. They can navigate complex mazes, optimize nutritional challenges and even find their way through a miniature version of the Tokyo subway system; they show swarm, or collective, intelligence. But can they learn?” https://lnkd.in/gK2jtCA View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR MEMORIES. “Habituation and recovery may not seem especially advanced. However, they require a form of basic learning coupled to a type of memory. Given this, the team reasoned that this physical memory could potentially be transmissible. When slime molds meet each other they can undergo cellular fusion, whereby the two formerly independent individuals join forces to form a larger single entity. If fused cells can share nuclei and cytoplasm, why not their memories too?” http://jeb.biologists.org/content/220/7/1166.1 View in LinkedIn

MEMORY TRANSMISSION. “When the team fused a habituated slime mold with an unhabituated one, they found that the unhabituated individual gained the salt habituation of the other. Something, as yet unidentified, thus carried durable memories from one individual to another.” http://jeb.biologists.org/content/220/7/1166.1 View in LinkedIn

MIND MELD. “Our world is filled with sensory inputs that we experience and share. But imagine yourself stripped of sight, sound, taste or smell. How would you learn from others? How would you teach what you know? You couldn't simply push your brain, with all its knowledge, into another's head. Yet, this is essentially what slime molds do. By fusing together, they share information. And, as the authors have shown, as more individuals fuse, the faster they learn.” http://jeb.biologists.org/content/220/7/1166.1 View in LinkedIn

ELECTRICALLY CONDUCTING TUBES. “The slime mold is capable of sensing tactile, chemical, and optical stimuli and converting them to characteristic patterns of its electrical potential oscillations. The electrical responses to stimuli may propagate along protoplasmic tubes for distances exceeding tens of centimeters, as impulses in neural pathways do.” https://lnkd.in/gC3MaMJ View in LinkedIn

COMMUNICATION TUBE ALIGNMENT. “Attractants such as food increase the local oscillation frequency and initiate contraction waves propagating outwards. Tubes within the network that lie parallel to the direction of propagation are reinforced, as cytoplasm moves towards them, while perpendicular tubes decay. The reinforced tubes become thicker, the tubes that link the network via the shortest path accommodate the highest flow per unit time and the network length becomes optimised by positive feedback.” https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/40/6/798/2400841 View in LinkedIn

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. “In Physarum, positive feedback generated through increased oscillation rate and tube size results in the engulfment of profitable food sources, while negative feedback likely generated by crowding at the food source causes engulfment to stop once the entire surface is covered.” https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/40/6/798/2400841 View in LinkedIn

LEADERSHIP. “In the early stages of Dictyostelium aggregation, the waves of cAMP that give rise to the distinctive spiral and circular wave patterns are controlled by small numbers of ‘pacemaker cells’ that send out coordinated pulses of cAMP. These cells play a key role in organising collective behaviour in Dictyostelium. Growing evidence suggests that these leaders arise by chance, with no cells intrinsically destined to be leaders.” https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/40/6/798/2400841 View in LinkedIn

GATHERING DATA. “A slime mold makes decisions about its propagation direction based on information fusion from thousands of spatially extended protoplasmic loci, similarly to a neuron collecting information from its dendritic tree. The analogy is distant yet inspiring.” http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/ARTL_a_00153 View in LinkedIn