It’s a controversial idea—that smarts can arise in the absence of a brain—one that started back in the middle of the 20th century. Psychologist Beatrice Gelber reported in 1962 that a single-celled organism called a paramecium could learn to associate a piece of wire with food, much like Pavlov’s dogs had learned to associate a buzzer with mealtime. Now, the idea is getting a more serious look from the scientific community, with a handful of recent experiments suggesting that some forms of memory can be encoded intracellularly, possibly supporting the emergence of complex behaviors across the animal kingdom. “The great insight is that these are all instances of one fundamental capacity that exists in a wide range of systems: the ability to alter your future behavior based on your past experience,” says Tufts University regenerative and developmental biologist Michael Levin.
Recent years have seen the publication of some perplexing findings ...
