linkedin post 2020-01-17 04:02:27

linkedin post 2020-01-17 04:02:27

Uncategorized
TOKYO RAILWAY NETWORK. "Inside laboratories slime molds have effectively re-created Tokyo's railway network in miniature as well as the highways of Canada, the U.K. and Spain. When researchers placed oat flakes or other bits of food in the same positions as big cities and urban areas, slime molds first engulfed the entirety of the edible maps. Within a matter of days, however, the protists thinned themselves away, leaving behind interconnected branches of slime that linked the pieces of food in almost exactly the same way that man-made roads and rail lines connect major hubs in Tokyo, Europe and Canada.” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-molds/ View in LinkedIn
Read More

linkedin post 2020-01-19 06:39:45

Uncategorized
THE DATA. “Now that numbers of neurons are available across rodents, primates and insectivores, we find that the cerebral cortex, despite varying in relative size from 42% (in the mouse) to 82% of brain mass (in the human), contains between 13 and 28% of all brain neurons in 15 of 18 species studied, ranging between 13% (in moles) and 41% (in the squirrel monkey.” https://lnkd.in/d2aUKat View in LinkedIn
Read More

linkedin post 2020-01-19 06:36:01

Uncategorized
FRESH EYES. “Such discrepancy would support the popular notion that brain evolution equates with development of the cerebral cortex, which comes to predominate over the other brain structures. However, analysis of absolute, rather than relative, cerebral cortical and cerebellar volumes in the same dataset leads to the opposite conclusion: the surface areas of these structures, would be evidence that the cerebral cortex and cerebellum are functionally related and have been evolving coordinately.” https://lnkd.in/d2aUKat View in LinkedIn
Read More

linkedin post 2020-01-18 09:30:23

Uncategorized
CORTEX AND SIZE. “The increase in relative size of the cerebral cortex with increasing brain size simultaneously with no systematic change in the relative size of the cerebellum has been used as evidence that these structures are functionally independent and have been evolving separately.” https://lnkd.in/d2aUKat View in LinkedIn
Read More

linkedin post 2020-01-18 09:25:48

Uncategorized
THE WEE PROBLEM. “The assumption that brain size relates to number of neurons in the brain in a similar fashion across orders. This assumption, which was justifiable by the lack of direct estimates of the neuronal composition of the brain of different species, is so widespread that it implicitly or explicitly underlies most comparative studies to date.” https://lnkd.in/d2aUKat View in LinkedIn
Read More

linkedin post 2020-01-20 06:43:59

Uncategorized
LIVING DEVICES. "Slime mold microfluidic logical gates. We explored the topologies of Physarum protoplasmic networks and demonstrated that basic logical gates can be implemented in living slime P. polycephalum. The Physarum fluidic gates are synchronized by propagating calcium waves. Slime mold P. polycephalum is a living microfluidic device. Even the diameter of Physarum protoplasmic tubes, approx. 100 μm, matches the width of most common man-made microfluidic devices.” https://lnkd.in/dweYfzS View in LinkedIn
Read More

linkedin post 2020-01-20 06:42:08

Uncategorized
MOLDY BINARY OPERATIONS. “The team has so far demonstrated that a slime mold network can carry out XOR or NOR Boolean operations. Chaining together arrays of such logic gates might allow a slime mold computer to carry out binary operations for computation.” https://lnkd.in/d7pZv9w View in LinkedIn
Read More

linkedin post 2020-01-19 06:56:42

Uncategorized
SO ENDS this first of two weekends untangling the Tomfoolery of using brain size as a proxy for intelligence. Beyond the howling methodological and assumptive errors, the elephant in the room is intelligence in creatures with no brain cells at all such as slime molds and plants. How we have got this so wrong seems closely related to 2,000 years of seeing nature as subordinate to man and man at the center of the universe favored by god. View in LinkedIn
Read More