{"id":129714,"date":"2021-10-30T15:23:13","date_gmt":"2021-10-30T22:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/simple-brainless-organisms-store-memories-externally"},"modified":"2021-10-30T15:23:13","modified_gmt":"2021-10-30T22:23:13","slug":"simple-brainless-organisms-store-memories-externally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/simple-brainless-organisms-store-memories-externally","title":{"rendered":"Simple, Brainless Organisms Store Memories Externally"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/simple-brainless-organisms-store-memories-externally.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Barely-alive creatures, such as the slime mold pictured, are able to produce \u201cmemories\u201d \u2014 they just store them in their physical surroundings rather than a brain. \u201cA slime mould is not a fungus or mould, but is in fact a protist, which is really the odds and ends of the natural world that don\u2019t fit in with the rest of our taxonomic grouping system,\u201d said PhD student Christopher Reid who led the study.<\/p>\n<p>Is it possible to know where you\u2019ve been when you don\u2019t have a brain? Depending on your definition of \u201cknow,\u201d the answer may be yes. Researchers have shown that the slime mold, an organism without anything that resembles a nervous system (or, for that matter, individual cells), is capable of impressive feats of navigation. It can even link food sources in optimally spaced networks. Now, researchers have shown it\u2019s capable of filling its environment with indications of where it has already searched for food, allowing it to \u201cremember\u201d its past efforts and focus its attention on routes it hasn\u2019t explored.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Barely-alive creatures, such as the slime mold pictured, are able to produce \u201cmemories\u201d \u2014 they just store them in their physical surroundings rather than a brain. \u201cA slime mould is not a fungus or mould, but is in fact a protist, which is really the odds and ends of the natural world that don\u2019t fit [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1506,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129714\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}