A Would-Be Nervous System Made from a Slime Mold

Abstract

The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a huge single cell that has proved to be a fruitful material for designing novel computing architectures. The slime mold is capable of sensing tactile, chemical, and optical stimuli and converting them to characteristic patterns of its electrical potential oscillations. The electrical responses to stimuli may propagate along protoplasmic tubes for distances exceeding tens of centimeters, as impulses in neural pathways do. A slime mold makes decisions about its propagation direction based on information fusion from thousands of spatially extended protoplasmic loci, similarly to a neuron collecting information from its dendritic tree. The analogy is distant yet inspiring. We speculate on whether alternative-would-be-nervous systems can be developed and practically implemented from the slime mold. We uncover analogies between the slime mold and neurons, and demonstrate that the slime mold can play the roles of primitive mechanoreceptors, photoreceptors, and chemoreceptors; we also show how the Physarum neural pathways develop. The results constituted the first step towards experimental laboratory studies of nervous system implementation in slime molds.

Self-Organization and Artificial Life

“…A classic example is spatial pattern formation in experimentally realized reactiondiffusion systems, such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction [3,192] and Gray-Scott-like selfreplicating spots [55,122], where dynamic patterns self-organize entirely from spatially localized chemical reactions. Similar approaches can also be taken by using microscopic biological organisms (e.g., slime molds) as the media of self-organization [2,3,58,91,130].…”

A hybrid single-source shortest path algorithm

“…Physarum polycephalum is an amoeboid organism that comprises a dendritic network of tube structures, which are analogous to neurons [26]. An important feature of Physarum polycephalum is the adaptation of its shape to the environment [27] via a self-organizing collective decision-making process [28].…”

Thirty Seven Things to Do with Live Slime Mould

“…It looks like neuron -can it be behave as one? In [21] we speculate on whether an alternative --would-be -nervous systems can be developed and practically implemented from the slime mould. We uncover analogies between the slime mould and neurons, and demonstrate that the slime mould can play a role of primitive mechanoreceptors, photoreceptors, chemoreceptors; we also show how the Physarum neural pathways develop [21].…”

“…We explored the analogy between behaviour of neuron growth cones and Physarum active growing zones [21]. To test if Physarum can develop information pathways we conducted several experiments on one to one scale models of human skull and brain.…”