"Slime mold." Sounds boring, right? Maybe a little gross? Maybe like you'd rather not be thinking about it right now, or ever?
Well, friends, prepare to be amazed. The slime mold is way, way more impressive than you think.
Take, for example, the Physarum polycephalum, or "many-headed slime" (a much better name, by the way). It's a single-celled organism with no brain to speak of, but it's capable of solving mazes, maintaining a balanced diet, and even "designing" an efficient railway system.
It's also capable of learning something new, researchers report this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B — a discovery that might help change our notion of what intelligence really means.
Learning "is something that we thought was very complicated," said lead author Romain Boisseau, a behavioral ecology student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. "You know, it requires a lot of neurons and connections and a brain."
"But maybe the fact that it is happening at the level of one cell indicates that this process we thought was complex might be enabled by a simple mechanism," he continued. This mechanism could have evolved very early in life. It could be more universal than we realized.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ngle-cell-organism-can-learn-without-a-brain/
Well, friends, prepare to be amazed. The slime mold is way, way more impressive than you think.
Take, for example, the Physarum polycephalum, or "many-headed slime" (a much better name, by the way). It's a single-celled organism with no brain to speak of, but it's capable of solving mazes, maintaining a balanced diet, and even "designing" an efficient railway system.
It's also capable of learning something new, researchers report this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B — a discovery that might help change our notion of what intelligence really means.
Learning "is something that we thought was very complicated," said lead author Romain Boisseau, a behavioral ecology student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. "You know, it requires a lot of neurons and connections and a brain."
"But maybe the fact that it is happening at the level of one cell indicates that this process we thought was complex might be enabled by a simple mechanism," he continued. This mechanism could have evolved very early in life. It could be more universal than we realized.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ngle-cell-organism-can-learn-without-a-brain/
