32 Nutses and Boltses

Slime molds … apparently they love rolled oats. Someone put one (Physarum polycephalum, as it happens … ) in a maze, and the crazy thing LEARNED the maze and found the oats. “Researchers credit these moving mat-like creatures with having some kind of spatial memory.” And there was me thinking that my references to our ancestral slime-molds was just an excuse to use the elegant name; and even though this info comes from a book written by an Obvious Cartesian Dualist (why don’t I just say ‘one of they NORMAL yumans’? … ) the story of consciousness does seem to go back at least that far, or to a common ancestor. Cool! …