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Slime Molds and Intelligence

Okay, despite going into a biology related field, I only just learned about slime molds, and hang on, because it gets WILD.

This guy in the picture is called Physarum polycephalum, one of the more commonly studied types of slime mold. It was originally thought to be a fungus, though we now know it to actually be a type of protist (a sort of catch-all group for any eukaryotic organism that isn't a plant, animal, or a fungus). As protists go, it's pretty smart. It is very good at finding the most efficient way to get to a food source, or multiple food sources. In fact, placing a slime mold on a map with food sources at all of the major cities can give a pretty good idea of an efficient transportation system. Here is a slime mold growing over a map of Tokyo compared to the actual Tokyo railway system:

Pretty good, right? Though they don't have eyes, ears, or noses, the slime molds are able to sense objects at a distance kind of like a spider using tiny differences in tension and vibrations to sense a fly caught in its web. Instead of a spiderweb, though, this organism relies on proteins called TRP channels. The slime mold can then make decisions about where it wants to grow. In one experiment, a slime mold was put in a petri dish with one glass disk on one side and 3 glass disks on the other side. Even though the disks weren't a food source, the slime mold chose to grow towards and investigate the side with 3 disks over 70% of the time.

Even more impressive is that these organisms have some sense of time. If you blow cold air on them every hour on the hour, they'll start to shrink away in anticipation when before the air hits after only 3 hours.

Now, I hear you say, this is cool and all, but like, I can do all those things too. The slime mold isn't special...

To which I would like to point out that you have a significant advantage over the slime mold, seeing as you have a brain.

Yeah, these protists can accomplish all of the things I just talked about, and they just... don't have any sort of neural architecture whatsoever? They don't even have brain cells, let alone the structures that should allow them to process sensory information and make decisions because of it. Nothing that should give them a sense of time. Scientists literally have no idea how this thing is able to "think'. But however it does, it is sure to be a form of cognition that is completely and utterly different from anything that we're familiar with.

The zebrafish is used as model in developmental biology. Here two juvenile fish of just two days old. © MPI für Entwicklungsbiologie/ Jürgen Berger/ Mahendra Sonawane

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To students taking exams right now:

You are smarter than you know

It is almost over, just keep holding on

You are not your grades, and your grades don’t define your intelligence

Trust and believe in yourself

Stop comparing yourself to others

Remember to drink water (not just coffee)

Stop the ban on blood donation of gay men

Like humans, these big-brained birds may owe their smarts to long childhoods

Human beings typically don’t leave the nest until well into our teenage years—a relatively rare strategy among animals. But corvids—a group of birds that includes jays, ravens, and crows—also spend a lot of time under their parents’ wings. Now, in a parallel to humans, researchers have found that ongoing tutelage by patient parents may explain how corvids have managed to achieve their smarts.

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