Slime Molds Show Surprising Degree of Intelligence

[wautd]

Picture and PDF inside

Single-celled slime molds demonstrate the ability to memorize and anticipate repeated events, a team of Japanese researchers reported in January. The study [pdf] clearly shows “a primitive version of brain function” in an organism with no brain at all.

In their experiment, biophysicist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University and colleagues manipulated the environment of Physarum slime-mold amoebas (near right). As the cells crawled across an agar plate, the researchers subjected them to cold, dry conditions for the first 10 minutes of every hour. During these cool spells, the cells slowed down their motion. After three cold snaps the scientists stopped changing the temperature and humidity and watched to see whether the amoebas had learned the pattern. Sure enough, many of the cells throttled back right on the hour in anticipation of another bout of cold weather. When conditions stayed stable for a while, the slime-mold amoebas gave up on their hourly braking, but when another single jolt of cold was applied, they resumed the behavior and correctly recalled the 60-minute interval. The amoebas were also able to respond to other intervals, ranging from 30 to 90 minutes.

The scientists point out that catching on to temporal patterns is no mean feat, even for humans. For a single cell to show such a learning ability is impressive, though Nakagaki admits he was not entirely surprised by the results. After working with the slime mold for years, he had a hunch that “Physarum could be cleverer than expected.” The findings of what lone cells are capable of “might be a chance to reconsider what intelligence is,” he says.

Once this slime develops speech as well, it'll be difficult to differentiate from creationists.

[ArmorPierce]

Interestingly enough, the fact that the amoebas fully resumed their hourly breaks after having stopped reacting like that due to the stimuli being gone is a sort of like how a psychology theory on how human superstition works.

Basically how an experiment would work is that birds would be given food rewards for flapping their wings (or something) in a cage every once in a while. This reinforced the behavior and the birds were very unwilling to give it up. Even after a long time had passed with no reward and the flapping of the wings would start to subside, a single reward was enough to bring back the behavior in full force and keep it going longer. This is in contrast to giving them constant rewards for the response and then ceasing and starting which didn't result in as high and long a response.

[Xenophobe3691]

This behavior also shows up in addictions; keep an addict away from their drug for a long time, and they start to develop normal patterns of behavior. Give them another hit, and they go right back to what they were doing before, and oftentimes even worse.

[Alan Bolte]

I recall seeing a related article on memristors not long ago. Here's a snippet:

Di Ventra speculates that the viscosities of the sol and gel components of the slime mould make for a mechanical analogue of memristance. When the external temperature rises, the gel component starts to break down and become less viscous, creating new pathways through which the sol can flow and speeding up the cell's movement. A lowered temperature reverses that process, but how the initial state is regained depends on where the pathways were formed, and therefore on the cell's internal history.