Soft Seminars
Cognition without neurons: Mathematical models of decentralized intelligence.
by
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Europe/Stockholm
Albano Building 3
Albano Building 3
Description
How can simple organisms lacking nervous systems encode and transmit environmental signals to generate complex, adaptive behaviours? Most life on Earth is neuronless, and organisms could sense, respond, and adapt to their environment long before nervous systems evolved. Yet research on intelligence has largely focused on humans, brains, and neuron-inspired artificial systems. This raises a fundamental question: which principles of biological information processing are specific to nervous systems, and which are shared more broadly across living systems?
In this presentation, I will introduce the study of non-neural cognition and describe how mathematical models can help us understand decentralized intelligence, particularly how local interactions generate coordinated and intelligent-like behaviour without global information or central control. I will focus on the unicellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum. Remarkably, despite being a single giant cell, Physarum displays a wide range of adaptive behaviours, including chemotaxis, adaptive network formation, and balancing exploration and exploitation in a two-armed bandit task. To explain how such different behaviours can arise, I will present our mechanochemical framework linking intracellular calcium dynamics to organism-scale behaviour across spatial and temporal scales. Rather than requiring a separate mechanism for each behaviour, the model shows how they can all emerge through local modulation of self-sustained calcium oscillations, coupled by diffusion, which are translated into mechanical forces. Our work provides a physically grounded mechanism for information processing in non-neural organisms and offers insight into how coordinated and adaptive behaviour may have been achieved before nervous systems evolved.