What Can a Cell Remember?(quantamagazine.org) |
What Can a Cell Remember?(quantamagazine.org) |
Recently, I acquired a sample of Physarium polycephalum and have been keeping it as a sort of "pet", if one can call it that. For those who don't know, slime molds like Physarium are actually considered a single-celled organism, at least when it's in its plasmodial phase. People typically feed them oat flakes because that's what they seem to love most, though I started trying some other foods to see what my little slime mold would be willing to eat. Carby things like pieces of bread, etc. The funny thing is that it seemed to really like those other foods, even multiple feedings in a row, but would then spontaneously refuse to respond to those same foods again. I've heard some anecdotes suggesting I'm not the only one to witness this. It really does seem like the slime mold is "remembering" at a level that may go beyond slime trails.
Could it be that one carby food isn't the same nutrients as another carby food?
A great book which expanded how I think about our own learning and cultural heritage
Anthropomorphizing cells as anything beyond little machines seems silly.
The past dictates the future and there are many, many, many, many, MANY ways to encode the past for future self-preservation.
You're doing yourself an intellectual disservice by sticking to one form of "memory". I'd even argue that you're the one anthropomorphizing the hardest by limiting "memory" to an idealized human form of memory.
Edit: did you read the article? The examples described go far beyond your straw man about undiscovered receptors.