What slime molds can teach us about thinking
Visit this online directory of the nearly 200 faculty members at Hampshire College and you’ll find that, listed between a professor of communications and a visiting professor of video and film, is a petri dish of yellow schmutz.
The schmutz is a plasmodial slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, a glob of living cells that exhibits decidedly non-schmutzlike behavior, such as solving mazes and anticipating periodic events – so much so that in 2017 Hampshire, a private liberal arts school in Amherst, Mass., awarded it a position of “visiting non-human scholar.”
The abilities of non-animals to remember events, recognize patterns, and solve problems are prompting scientists and philosophers to rethink what thinking is. In the 20th century, science demolished
E pluribus plasmodiumThinking fast and slowA space oddity?