"Fungal Mind" FUNGUS HAS COGNITION By ABINASH.D

-

                               THE BLOB

                                           Slime Mold Fungus INTELLIGENCE By Abinash.D Ψ



Imagine you're walking into a forest, and you roll over a fallen log with your foot. Fanning out on the underside, there is something moist and yellow – a bit like something you may have sneezed out, if that something was banana-yellow and spread itself out into elegant fractal branches.



This bizarre little organism doesn't have a brain, or a nervous system – its blobby, bright-yellow body is just one cell. This slime mold species has thrived, more or less unchanged, for a billion years in its damp, decaying habitats.

And, in the last decade, it's been changing how we think about cognition and problem-solving.

"I think it's the same kind of revolution that occurred when people realized that plants could communicate with each other," says biologist Audrey Dussutour of the French National Center for Scientific Research.

"Even these tiny little microbes can learn. It gives you a bit of humility."

P. polycephalum – adorably nicknamed "The Blob" by Dussutour – isn't exactly rare. It can be found in dark, humid, cool environments like the leaf litter on a forest floor. It's also really peculiar; although we call it a 'mold', it is not actually fungus. Nor is it animal or plant, but a member of the protist kingdom – a sort of catch-all group for anything that can't be neatly categorized in the other three kingdoms.


It starts its life as many individual cells, each with a single nucleus. Then, they merge to form the plasmodium, the vegetative life stage in which the organism feeds and grows.

In this form, fanning out in veins to search for food and explore its environment, it's still a single cell, but containing millions or even billions of nuclei swimming in the cytoplasmic fluid confined within the bright-yellow membrane.

Like all organisms, P. polycephalum needs to be able to make decisions about its environment. It needs to seek food and avoid danger. It needs to find the ideal conditions for its reproductive cycle. And this is where our little yellow friend gets really interesting. P. polycephalum doesn't have a central nervous system. It doesn't even have specialized tissues.

Yet it can solve complex puzzles, like labyrinth mazes, and remember novel substances. The kind of tasks we used to think only animals could perform.



"We're talking about cognition without a brain, obviously, but also without any neurons at all. So the underlying mechanisms, the whole architectural framework of how it deals with information is totally different to the way your brain works," biologist Chris Reid of Macquarie University in Australia 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Higgs boson "God Particle" By ABINASH.D

-
Image
  The Higgs boson is the God particle. It is an elementary particle in the Higgs field. It is found in the Higgs field.  Dark matter is not the same as the Higgs boson . The so-called God particle was proposed in the 1960s by  Peter Higgs  to explain why some particles, such as quarks—building blocks of protons, among other things—and electrons have mass, while others, such as the light-carrying photon particle, do not. The particle was finally discovered on July 4, 2012 , by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the most powerful particle accelerator in the world — located at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, Switzerland. The Higgs boson , the subatomic particle that has brought a Nobel Prize to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, is so small that its discovery took 40 years. It is so big for physics, though, that it took on the nickname the "God particle." The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field tha...
Read more

The Thoton Particle Theory -Abinash.D

-
Image
      Quantum Field Psychology: The Thoton Particle Theory  Introduction by Abinash.D is the first Unified Field Theory, incorporating the influence of mind and emotion upon physical reality, the Universe and other minds.It integrates the major fields of modern-day psychology with quantum physics and topological mathematics.First discovered at NASA in 1969, the formalized version of the theory was published in 2004, written in the Italian Alps by Dr. Ron Dalrymple, while a professor at the University of Maryland Overseas Program.His ground-breaking film, Paradise Found 2015, documents the discovery of this paradigm-shifting theory. This Second Edition clarifies many of the formulas and concepts for ease of understanding.
Read more

QUANTUM MECHANICAL OVERVIEW OF HUMAN MIND? BY ABINASH .D

-
Image
  Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of the tiny particles that make up all matter in the universe, namely ATOMS  and their subatomic components. One central tenet of the theory suggests a great deal of uncertainty in this world of the very small, something not seen at larger scales. For instance, in the big world, one can know where a train is on its route and how fast it's traveling, and given this data, one could predict when that train should arrive at the next station. Now, swap out the train for an  electron , and your predictive power disappears — you can't know the exact location and  momentum  of a given electron, but you could calculate the probability that the particle may appear in a certain spot, traveling at a particular rate. In this way, you could gain a hazy idea of what the electron might be up to.  Just as uncertainty pervades the subatomic world, it also seeps into our decision-making process, whether we're debating which new s...
Read more