What We Have in Common with Slime Molds
September 7, 2021 | Terry Sharrer
Physarum polycephalum, an acellular slime mold, does not have a brain, but is capable of a kind of thinking by reacting to stresses in its environment. For that reason, researchers at Tufts, Harvard and the Wyss Institute have been studying how this organism makes decisions involving movement. As this piece observes “Understanding the abilities and limitations of sensing, preferences, and primitive decision-making in aneural systems is crucial for revealing the phylogenetic origin of cognition, and for the design of bio-inspired robotics and synthetic living machines.” MORE
Image Credit: Wiley Online Library