T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon is apparently a bit obsessed with them, just saying.
But slime molds have no brain or nervous system...but can solve problems. Slime molds are members of the protist kingdom, which is where we file the extremely weird shit.
A slime mold is one cell but with lots of nuclei. Basically, the nuclei never bother to separate themselves with cell membranes.
P. polycephalum, a common slime mold, can navigate mazes if you bribe it with, of all things, oats. (It doesn't eat the oats, it eats bacteria that lives on oats).
It can solve the traveling salesman problem.
It has memory.
It can fuse with other slime molds to pass on that memory. I.e., communicate.
One researcher tried putting one on a growth medium used for mammal cells and it promptly tried to escape by building a weird three-dimensional structure to pull itself out. The theory is it hated the taste!
No, it can't handle abstract reasoning, but it solves its own problems, the ones it needs to.
And it tells us cognition does not, in fact, need a brain.
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