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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

NEURAL PATHWAYS. “We uncover analogies between the slime mold and neurons, and demonstrate that the slime mold can play the roles of primitive mechanoreceptors, photoreceptors, and chemoreceptors; we also show how the Physarum neural pathways develop.” http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/ARTL_a_00153 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

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

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

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

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

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