Memory Is Topology, Not Storage
A Slime Mould Has No Brain Physarum polycephalum — the slime mould — is technically a single cell. It can stretch several metres. It has no neurons, no nervous system, and no brain. It looks like something you’d scrape off a log after a rainy week. It also solves mazes. In 2000, a research team at Hokkaido University put a slime mould at one end of a maze with food at the other. The mould extended tentacles throughout the maze, found the food, then retracted everything except the shortest path. It had solved the maze — not by thinking, not by computing, but by growing toward what worked and shrinking away from what didn’t. ...