Slime mold is a sort of farm gelatinous blob, it’s a single cell but it doesn’t have any neuron or brain and yet if you put it in an environment in which there is a complex decision to make, for instance which direction it must choose to find the best food source, it is capable of solving this problem relatively easily. It is just visually a jelly making smart decisions and the question is how something that doesn’t have a brain is capable of solving this everyday problem that is absolutely crucial for survival ?
When the slime mold is hungry it’s going to send out of its main biomass, little fingers that are going to explore the environment. We’re trying to figure out how do the different parts of the slime mold decide as a sort of collective, it’s time to move to the right or it’s time to move to the left. The different parts of this slime mold are going to actually talk to each other.
If you take a time lapse of slime all you are going to observe is that the membrane of the slime mold is actually oscillating about every minute inflating and deflating. Just like we have muscles in our body that can cause physical contractions, the slime mold has a cytoskeleton and motor proteins that causes contractions. This pumping mechanism is going to actually trigger the neighboring areas of the cycle to pump harder and the slime mold grows into the direction of the favorable environment. This physical mechanism is what we believe this language is using in order to make its decision, so we design experiments where we want to try to trick the slime or to start pumping harder.
We have invented this little machine that is essentially poking the membrane of the slime mold regularly, we have a little flexible bar that we can put in contact with the tubule of the slime mold, by doing this we’re simulating a section of the membrane to start oscillating faster. Basically what we would like to be able to do is to influence the slime molds choices, if you will, with this physical manipulation. The hypothesis of this experiment is that it’s a physical rather than chemical signal that is transmitted along the axis of the slime mold, we have to replicate this experiments hundreds of times so it should be about a year before we can start processing all the data.
If we didn’t have time lapse, we’d miss the entire process that take all the slime mold to make a decision, as we learn more about the way information is transferred inside the slime or we’re going to be able to ask a big a question about the origine of intelligence on earth, where is the intelligence incoded inside this organism and one of the possible explanation is that the intelligence is encoded into the physical mechanisms that the slime mold uses to move in space. When life emerge and before anything was capable of communicating and perceiving anything there was just physics, decision-making doesn’t necessarily need complex communication mechanism often just physics is enough.
Text based on transcript by Simon Garnier* & Greg Weber**
*New Jersey Institute of Technology, **Rutgers University