Behavior
When a slime mold mass or mound is physically separated, the cells find their way back to re-unite. Studies on Physarum have even shown an ability to learn and predict periodic unfavorable conditions in laboratory experiments (Saigusa et al. 2008). Professor John Tyler Bonner, who has spent a lifetime studying slime molds argues that they are "no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath, yet they manage to have various behaviours that are equal to those of animals who possess muscles and nerves with ganglia – that is, simple brains."
Atsushi Tero of Hokkaido University grew the slime mold Physarum polycephalum in a flat wet dish. Around its initial position representing Tokyo, he placed oat flakes corresponding to the locations of other major cities in the Greater Tokyo Area. As Physarum avoids bright light, light was used to simulate mountains, water and other obstacles. The mold first densely filled the space with plasmodia, then thinned the network to focus on efficiently connected branches. The network strikingly resembled Tokyo's rail system.
Read more about this topic: Slime Mould
Famous quotes containing the word behavior:
“One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“The psychological umbilical cord is more difficult to cut than the real one. We experience our children as extensions of ourselves, and we feel as though their behavior is an expression of something within us...instead of an expression of something in them. We see in our children our own reflection, and when we don’t like what we see, we feel angry at the reflection.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“No one knows better than children how much they need the authority that protects, that sets the outer limits of behavior with known and prescribed consequences. As one little boy expressed it to his mother, “You care what I do.””
—Leontine Young (20th century)