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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

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

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

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

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

PROCESSING INFORMATION. “Life is characterized in terms of information processing and single-celled organisms show remarkably advanced information processing capabilities. A neural network with inter-cellular connections is not necessary for biological computation, which may have implications for brain studies.” https://ukacc.group.shef.ac.uk/proceedings/control2008/papers/p246.pdf View in LinkedIn

BIOCOMPUTING. “Slime mold is a living prototype of amorphous biological computers and robotic devices capable of solving a range of tasks of graph optimization and computational geometry.” http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6482606/ View in LinkedIn

EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE. “We provide a unique demonstration of a spatial memory system in a nonneuronal organism, supporting the theory that an externalized spatial memory may be the functional precursor to the internal memory of higher organisms.” http://www.pnas.org/content/109/43/17490.full View in LinkedIn

BRAINLESS MEMORY. “Spatial memory enhances an organism’s navigational ability. Memory typically resides within the brain, but what if an organism has no brain? We show that the brainless slime mold Physarum polycephalum constructs a form of spatial memory by avoiding areas it has previously explored.” http://www.pnas.org/content/109/43/17490.full View in LinkedIn

DECEPTIVE SIMPLICITY. “It came as some surprise when researchers discovered that an evolutionarily simple slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, consisting nominally of a single cell, was able to compute a near optimal path through a maze.” https://ukacc.group.shef.ac.uk/proceedings/control2008/papers/p246.pdf View in LinkedIn