For a thing without a brain, there’s a particular type of slime mold out there that is especially intelligent. According to research detailed by ScienceAlert and published in PRX Life, the bright yellow slime mold Physarum polycephalum can solve mazes, remember routes, and consistently find efficient paths to food without anything even closely resembling a brain or nervous system.
It’s a real oddity. It behaves like something that has a brain that can make choices, and yet, it’s just a blob of goo. Maybe there’s some kind of hidden form of intelligence at work here? Or maybe we’re just projecting human ideas onto it, like how a random collection of objects might form something that looks kind of like a face?
A team of researchers decided to figure out why this blob is so smart, and the answer is a lot simpler than you think, and somehow still super impressive.
A Brainless Blob Can Solve Problems Better Than You’d Expect. Scientists Just Learned Why.
Researchers in Germany and the United States trapped starving slime molds inside hexagon-shaped enclosures and blasted them with blue light, which the slime molds absolutely hate, forcing them to choose between staying and enduring or escaping to find food. It chose escape. The researchers observed the slime mold start probing its surroundings with its small tendrils, testing multiple routes at once as it crept around the hexagon in search of an exit. It eventually found one, and, across all of the different geometric shapes, it consistently found and exploited the same path again and again.
It was so consistent that you’d think it was a learned skill. Maybe it memorized the path out? But the researchers don’t think it’s thinking. Its body is constantly pulsing with rhythmic contractions that push fluid through an internal network of tubes. As it explores, those contractions start to reorganize themselves until they discover the most efficient way to move the greatest mass.
It isn’t thinking. What we’re seeing here is something like the physics of fluids naturally doing their thing. What looks like decision-making is actually just the ebbs and flows of a liquid shifting mass in several directions until its enclosure breaks. It’s not thinking, plotting, and debating. It’s just so naturally repelled by the blue light that starts expanding out rapidly, pushing against the boundaries of its enclosure, pushing fluid through its complex internetwork of tubing, until it breaks free, all the while following the natural laws of physics so effectively that it looks more intelligent than it is.
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