How do slime molds learn?

Quanta Magazine is a treasure trove of popular articles about hot topics in basic research and biology and neuroscience are the hottest topics now. The article "Slime Molds Remember — but Do They Learn?" about learning of slime molds (see this) serves as a good example of pleasant surprises popping up on weekly basis.

1. The popular article tells that slime molds are monocellulars - for long time believed to belong to fungi - but actually somewhat like amoebas. They have neither neurons nor brains. The neuroscientific dogma says that neurons are necessary for learning so that slime molds should not learn. They should only adapt by selecting behaviors from a genetically inherited repertoir. Same would be true about plants, which are also known to learn.
   

   For physicist these beliefs look strange. Both animals and plants and also slime molds share the basic aspects about what it is to be alive, why should they be unable to learn? The research of biologist Audrey Dussutour and her team described in the article indeed shows that slime molds are indeed able to learn.
   
   

2. Conditioning is the basic mechanism of learning, which by definition leads to a creation of a new kind of behavior rather than selecting some behavior from an existing repertoir as happens in adaptation. Typically the conditioning is created by associating unpleasant sensory stimulus such as electric shock to some other stimulus, which can be pleasant, say information about the presence of food. This leads to avoidance behavior and the mere presence of food can induce the avoidance behavior.
   
   
3. It was found that slime mold learns a habit of avoiding the unpleasant stimulus - habituation is said to take place. Habituation generates of new behavior and is not mere adaption. For instance, habituation can mean stopping noticing stimulus like smell if it is not dangerous or important for survival. In the experiments the slime molds were conditioned to avoid noxious substances (having bitter "taste") and they remembered the behavior after a year of physiologically disruptive enforced sleep as the technical terms expresses it.
   
   
4. Central nervous system has been believed to be responsible for habituation since neurons receive and process the sensory the stimuli, build kind of cognitive representations about them, and generate motor response. Neuroscientist believe that learning means strengthening of synaptic contacts eventually giving rise to a learned motor response to a sensory stimulus by a sequence of associations
   

   Against this background the ability of slime molds to learn looks mysterious. How do they perceive the stimulus, how do they process it, how do they respond to it? We know actually little about cognition and learning: we know a lof about the neural correlates of cognition but not what cognition is.
   
   

Forgetting for a moment the question about what cognition is, one can just ask what could lead to the change of behaviour of the slime mold. Some time ago I learned about another fascinating finding related to learning from the article "Scientists Sucked a Memory Out of a Snail and Stuck It in Another Snail" (see this). What was found that one can take RNA of a snail that has been conditioned by some painful stimulus and transfer it to another snail by scattering RNA on its brain neurons! Same can be achieved also by feeding snail with the conditioned snail. RNA must somehow represent memories. If this is true for snail it can be true also for the slime mold.

Usually learning is assigned with cognition regarded as kind of linguistic cognition. One speaks also of emotional intelligence: could learning be based on emotions? The TGD based model for emotions (see this) inspired by the model of music harmony (see this and this) leading to a model of genetic code predicting correctly vertebrate coderelies on this idea and leads to a model for what learning could be also in the case of slime molds.

1. Music expresses and creates emotions coded in its harmony (think of major and minor scales as simple examples). This could be true in much more general sense. Not only music made of sound but also of light - dark photons in TGD framework - could realize these functions of music. DNA would have a representation in terms of a collection of 3-chords made of three dark photons with frequencies in proportions allowed by the harmony.
   
   
2. The model of harmony based on icosahedral and tetrahedral geometries predicts a large number of harmonies representing emotional states, moods. The music of light makes possible communication between DNA, RNA, amino-acids (AAs), even tRNAs and their dark variants DDNA, DRNA, DAA, DtRNA. Communications are possible if the three chords can resonate note by not: ideal situation occurs if the harmony defining the mood is same in sender and receiver. Emphatics are those, who experience also the sufferings of the other people. Moods can be transferred from RNA to DNA and here they can induce epigenetic change leading to a change in behavior.
   
   
3. The painful conditioning of snail would induce a new mood of RNA of snail (probably rather depressive!) and this would in turn infect the DNA of the snail (strong emotions are infective) and the mood of DNA would induce the epigenetic change leading to the avoidance behavior (see this and this). Emotions would be behind the learning and learning would take place at DNA level as epigenetic changes changing the gene expression. Habitutation would involve epigenetic changes and adaptation involve only activation of appropriate inherited genes.
   
   

It must be added that TGD also leads to a vision about the role of neurons in many aspects different from the neuroscientific view although agreeing with the basic facts and explaining quite a number of anomalies (see this).

1. The notion of magnetic body (MB) containing dark matter as h_eff/h₀=n phases of ordinary matter is central. The networks having as nodes objects consisting of ordinary matter (molecules, organelles, organs, even organisms) connected to a network made of flux tubes containing dark matter would give rise to both cellular and neuronal networks. Magnetic flux tube connecting two nodes would serve as a correlate of attention and communication pathway using supra currents or dark photons. Also classical signals can propagate along it.
   
   
2. The primary function of nerve pulse activity at the level of CNS would not be communication between neurons but building of communication pathways from flux tubes along which dark photon signals can propagate with maximal signal velocity. The situation would be same in travel phone connections: the communication pathway would be created first and only then the communications with light velocity would begin. Synaptic transmission would build a bridge between otherwise non-connected flux tubes​. This would give rise to long waveguides. Dark photons transforming to ordinary photons would yield bio-photons, which have remained mysterious in standard bio-chemistry since their spectrum is not consistent with the discrete spectrum of lines produced if they were generated in molecular transitions.
   
   
3. Sensory experiences would be basically at the level of sensory organs and sensory percepts would involve pattern recognition involving repeated feedback signal from brain an leading a standard perception nearest to the sensory input. The new view about time provided by zero energy ontology allows to circumvent the counter argument inspired by phantom leg phenomenon.
   
   
4. Nerve pulse patterns would frequency modulate the generalized Josephson frequencies assignable to the membrane proteins acting as Josephson junctions and generating dark Josephson radiation as part of EEG propagating to the MB of the system. Thus nerve pulse patterns would code information but this information would be sent to MB.
   
   
5. It is quite possible that the proposed RNA level mechanism is the microscopic mechanism behind strengthening of synaptic connections believed to be behind neuron level learning although also here new findings suggests that situation is not quite it has been believed to be (see this).
   
   

This did not say anything about cognition yet. TGD leads also to a view about mathematical correlates of cognition requiring profound generalization of the mathematical structure of theoretical physics. Real number field is tailor made for the description of the sensory world but how to describe the correlates of cognition. Here p-adic number fields come in rescue and in TGD framework one ends up to a unification of real physics and their p-adic analogs to what I call adelic physics (see this and this).

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.