Events

Do plants have feelings? How blind are we to their own internal experiences? Perhaps they offer an untapped opportunity to reconsider how we understand ourselves. What about bees? Do we appreciate their unique cognitive abilities, both as a group and as individuals? Their brains may grant them a kind of consciousness akin, or not, to ours. And, what about cells? How does bioelectricity contribute to their collective problem-solving?

Slime molds are remarkable single cell organisms that belong to the Amoebozoa, a kingdom usually considered to be a sister group to fungi and animals. Slime molds are model organisms to study problem-solving in aneural biological systems. Although they lack the complex hardware of a true brain, they live in a complex ecological niche and face the same decision-making challenges that animals are faced with: they must feed, mate and adapt to changing conditions.