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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteA slime mould can find a short route through a maze and build networks that resemble transport systems. Whether that makes it intelligent is a harder question: the behaviour is observable, but scientists disagree about whether cognition requires a nervous system or can be studied in cells without one. The 38-minute Aarva audio edition listed by Apple Podcasts explores that dispute through the work on Physarum polycephalum.
What is the slime mould in the story?
Physarum polycephalum is not a mould in the everyday sense of a fungus. Slime moulds are neither fungi, plants nor animals. The Guardian feature by Samanth Subramanian, published on 8 September 2026 and modified on 1 October, describes Physarum as a conspicuous single cell containing many nuclei—a structure called a syncytium.
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As it forages, the organism senses food, including bacteria and other microbes, and extends or retracts protoplasmic tubes. The feature reports a top speed of about 1 centimetre an hour. That figure is the report’s description of the organism’s speed, not a universal rate under every condition.
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What did the maze and Tokyo experiments show?
Finding a route to food
In a maze demonstration reported in 2000, researcher Toshiyuki Nakagaki placed food so that Physarum could extend through the maze toward it. The mould found a shortest route to the food. Nakagaki recalled, “I thought we’d have to rewrite the dictionary.” The result was striking, but it did not show that the organism consciously planned a route: it showed that its growth and foraging could produce an efficient path.
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Making a network
In a later arrangement described by the Guardian, oat flakes represented Tokyo and 35 satellite towns. As the mould spread from the central food source, it extended and joined tubules. The resulting network nearly retraced the railway system, and Nakagaki suggested it might even improve on human design. That is evidence of network formation through a living organism’s responses to its environment; by itself, it does not settle whether those responses count as intelligence.
The feature describes Physarum as comprising many small oscillators. Food cues alter oscillation and the flow of protoplasm, helping shape how the organism grows. It also recounts an observed timing response to periodic wind gusts, while noting that researchers do not know how the organism keeps time. The report does not establish a detailed mechanism for that timing response.
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Why do scientists disagree about calling it intelligent?
The disagreement is not over whether the mould behaves in ways that can be measured. It is over what those behaviours mean and what criteria the words “intelligence,” “cognition,” “learning” and “memory” should require. In the Guardian’s account, the divide is not simply between people who think the organism is smart and people who do not.
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| Question | Neural-system emphasis | Biogenic emphasis |
|---|---|---|
| What machinery is required? | Cognition and intelligence should be tied to neurons or nervous systems. | Cognitive traits may be studied in non-neural cells and other living systems. |
| What counts as evidence? | Maze-solving or adaptive growth may be explained as physical and chemical responses without attributing cognition. | Information processing, memory or decision-making may be investigated through measurable behaviour and mechanisms beyond animals. |
| What is the risk in the language? | Terms borrowed from human minds can overstate what has been demonstrated or anthropomorphize an organism. | Restricting those terms to humans or animals may obscure shared principles across living systems. |
The feature calls researchers who stress neural systems “neuropurists.” Philosopher Pamela Lyon uses “biogenic” for the view that traits such as cognition may be intrinsic beyond animals. Those labels describe positions in this reported debate, not universally agreed scientific categories.
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Lyon argues that the terms and assumptions are changing: “The locus of intelligence and cognition is now finally shifting from the human paradigm. We’re on the cusp of a Copernican revolution, and it’s barreling towards us.” Michael Levin, a Tufts University professor, likewise argues against a sharp boundary: “Nature is telling us that there’s a continuum – there are no bright lines that appear to say: ‘This side cognition, that side not’ or ‘This side intelligence, that side not,’” he said. On the categories themselves, Levin says, “They’re not sharp scientific categories.”
Critics worry that extending mental language too freely can turn physical and chemical processes into a story about a mind, or invite machine-like or animistic interpretations of life. The feature quotes an unnamed reviewer reacting to the idea: “This is dangerous. You must not dignify this idea in a journal of this stature.” The reviewer is not identified, so the warning should not be attributed to a named scientist.
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What does the sea-slug research add?
The Guardian also discusses David Glanzman’s experiments with the sea slug Aplysia as part of the broader question of where memory-related processes occur. In the account, a memory-related synaptic response was chemically erased; after a later mild dose of serotonin, strong synapses grew again. The feature also describes 2018 work in which RNA from habituated slugs was injected into untrained slugs, which then showed reduced withdrawal responses to shocks.
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These reported findings challenge simple assumptions about the relationship between memory and synapses, but they do not establish that memory is generally stored in RNA, that memories transfer between organisms in ordinary circumstances, or that cells consciously remember. They are part of the debate about what mechanisms and behaviours justify the language of memory.
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What the podcast can—and cannot—answer
The episode’s listener-facing question is, “If a single cell can solve a maze, does a mind really need a brain?” The most careful answer is that the maze result does not prove the mould has a mind, but it does make the definition of cognition consequential. If intelligence is defined by certain capacities or measurable forms of information processing, some researchers argue those capacities can be examined outside nervous systems. If it requires neural machinery, the same behaviour can be described without calling it cognition.
The Guardian feature supplies the reported examples and voices in the dispute; the Apple Podcasts listing identifies the Aarva audio edition as 38 minutes long and lists its publication at 09:33 UTC on 10 September 2026. The listing summarizes the feature rather than independently verifying the experiments. The examples are best understood as evidence that a living system can produce striking adaptive behaviour—not as a settled demonstration that slime moulds think as animals do.
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