On the quiet intelligence of the plasmodium
Two weeks in the leaf litter behind my mother's house in Devon, with a hand lens and Gulielma Lister's Monograph for company, taught me more about decision-making than four years at the Institute ever did.
The thing about a Physarum polycephalum is that it has no head, despite the name, and yet it decides. It is a single cell the colour of wet sulphur, spread across a fallen oak like a slow yellow lace, and over the course of a damp October night it will solve a problem that takes a graduate student three weeks of planning meetings — namely, where to put the next bit of itself.
I had not meant to write about slime moulds. I had meant to write about labour markets. But after a particularly dispiriting symposium in Bristol last March — three hours of men in good shoes describing “decision frameworks” — I went home, opened Lister's monograph at random, and found myself looking at Plate XLII: a reticulate vein of P. polycephalum exploring a piece of bark, drawn in 1894 with such patient love that I could see exactly which strand had been laid down first.
The veins remember what the head forgets
Plasmodial movement is not a march. It is a negotiation. The organism extrudes itself in every plausible direction at once, then — finding nothing of interest in seven of them — quietly withdraws those seven and thickens the eighth. By morning the network looks deliberate, even elegant; the failures have been reabsorbed without ceremony.