The real title is "Biologist Blowing Our Minds," and screw that. Just read the thing.
- If it’s sensitive to vibrations, does it react to music?
- We grew the Physarum on a plate, and the plate was sitting on a speaker, and my student was driving the speaker with her iPhone. And we could see that for certain types of music, it would grow quite differently than for others. Some of them, it grew very nicely. Some of them, it just didn’t grow at all. It just really hated it; it just hunkered down.
Lots of cool stuff in that article We know it has memory. It can learn from experience. We know it does make all kinds of decisions if you give it various options of things it can do. The whole thing is a hydraulic computer. We injected little fluorescent beads into the thing. There are flows through the cytoplasm. And the cool thing is that if you have a fork like a “Y,” you see that it just shuts off one branch off, and the stream only goes the other way. It has selective control over each branch point—it’s a synapse, basically. I’m sure once we start looking, we’re going to find degrees of agency all over the place.To go back to the slime mold, how does it decide?
Butterflies retain memories from when they were caterpillars, even though their brains turned to mush in the chrysalis.
When I say this thing “wants to do XYZ,” I’m not saying it can write poetry about its dreams. It doesn’t necessarily have that kind of second-order metacognition; it doesn’t know what it wants. But it still wants. [...]