The Biophysics of a Brainless Animal
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2024
- Trichoplax adhaerens is a species of placozoa, the simplest animals at the base of the tree of life. It doesn't have a nervous system, yet it exhibits complex behaviors. How is this possible? The answer could illuminate the origins of the nervous system-and the future of robotics. “It’s a tour de force of biophysics,” said Orit Peleg of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Read the full article at Quanta Magazine: www.quantamagazine.org/this-a...
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This channel plays a very important role in making one sustain one's curiosity with all the interesting breakthroughs being updated frequently and explaining them as well in simple words.. Wow
With the industrial revolution it was natural to understand the brain as a mechanical machine, and to take some distance from the idea of a metaphysical soul; today, neuroscience sees the nervous system based in electricity. To this day, we can't pinpoint what "intelligence" and "consciousness" exactly is, leaving room for a lot of non testable hypotheses. A fascinating aspect of this study's findings is to wonder how complex and "miraculous" can these seemingly straightforward physical phenomena really be. It is humbling and exciting to imagine how the line between organic and inorganic, intelligent and unintelligent beings can be blurry and how, in the end, they could be understood and explained by the same, more general theories.
These are very smart words, my man!!
The most abstract definition of intelligence is "the ability to correlate and coordinate [new] information." By this definition every energetic form [atoms, electron shells, photons] display some quanta of intelligence because all energetic forms are in motion and responding to their environments.
Reminds me of when i wrote about free will in two college essays earlier this year. Got As but my non-literary brain was really tired of it. And needless to say, these are very important questions for all mankind to ask!
From my (relatively poor, armchair at best) understanding of neuroscience and physics, I believe consciousness to be the natural result of a high density of electricity in a system, or ordered system. Which implies many things have consciousness that people would not traditionally consider alive, such as computers, or even plasmas.
A truly interesting question is that does consciousness require life, or are they two separate things? If directly given energy, would consciousness be able to occur, or is it something unique to biological system?
Being a 12 th grader in India it is really fascinating to know about more breakthroughs science is making. Thank you Qanta magazine. 😊
Being a graduate student, it's everyday news.
@@benbarberian1701 best way to put it.
@@benbarberian1701 Being a student with a PhD and doing post-doctoral research, its more than everyday its omnipotent
Same here bhaiya👍
कान्ता मैगजीन
Fascinating. I have been interested in this animal since I learned about it in the 1990s. It's good to find that someone is researching it - and splendid to discover that it has so much to teach us!
Something similar is the synchronicity achieved in oscillating pendulums. No matter the starting point, pendulums with the same period end up syncing together
Just thought exactly of the same thing!
Excellent visualizations as usual. Quanta's team is the best
I feel like the word intelligence is poorly chosen in this context; if the poles of two magnets align, you don't say the magnets are intelligent.
IMO It's intelligent because it can not only coordinate it's movement, but strategize how to find food, form memories, problem solve, and ultimately, far away on the tree of life, create you.
It may operate under the same laws, but I’d say it’s more complex than a pair of magnets
incredible how this resembles the dynamics of cellular automata
"Professor! This organism exhibits regular, orientable ambulatory translational velocity across its habitable environment as part of an evolutionary adaptation of self-mobilization!!. What do we call it??"
"We'll call it...walking."
It’s a shame this video doesn’t get much traffic, because your comment definitely deserves more than one like
Thank you Universe for making Quanta magazine exist
emergent behavior is a very interesting topic, make more such videos
thank you for the video
Great video and well explained. It's appreciated. Kudos.
thank you for these videos ❤️ they’re very educational and also appreciated by every single one of us curious monkeys !!!
this is insanely cool! Didnt know cilia can be used for walking
Very cool--nicely presented. Thank you!
this principle, unity despite individuality. can be used in all aspects of life, this is an amazing discovery for philosophy!
Well, this is very interesting because of the fact that this is technically a single-celled organism with no external component controlling it. I’ve always wondered how our own organic molecules such as the ribosomes and motor proteins just knew where to go without even having a nervous system. Yes, we know they are instructed by other cellular signals, but how do they “know” how to move to the destination? Maybe simple single-celled organisms like these might hold the key to answering how they "know"?
They just said it had millions of cells...
they are not really single-cell organisms.
They are the simplest pluricellularspecies of the metazoa, and are made up of 6 differnt cell-types. They might lack organs, or neurons, or myotic cells, but that doesn't make them unicellular.
From what I understand through my studies, ribosomes and other organitesb don't really move in the cell's cytoplasm by their own means. They're just there and when they come in contact with substances that they recognise, they do what they are capable of, using the resources present everywhere around them.
But what I just said is not something I can prove, or that I read in a scientifical magasine. It's just my own understanding based on my very limited knowledge, so don't just take it for true without a grain of salt.
Anthropomorphism. These are the same kinds of curiosities that make people think viruses do anything as if they were alive. Cells don’t know anything. They are just doing what they do. For example a virus as most think of it, is actually a virus PARTICLE. It is literally a piece of genetic code surrounded by a membrane and that is it. It is not alive. Once it enters the host cell, that piece of genetic code hijacks the cellular machinery. Does the cell “know” this? No. Does the cell realize it’s now making virus particles and will continue until it explodes and all the virus particles will spread? No. It’s just doing what it does and the addition of this viral RNA let’s say changes the cell’s machinery.
I think inversely that which this amazing work proves is that flocking is not a complex behavior. As we've seen with neural networks stacking a lot of small computational units in a proper way can model complex functions from limited input. This type of intelligence is not however always the same. What makes a behavior complex is the fact that you discover, consolidate and compress into semantic bottlenecks the world you interact with and live in, e.g. in internal representations, weird organs, learning procedures etc. Emergence was a great scientific direction for a long time but it needs to reorient towards understanding and qualifying an importance scale and typology of phenomena of emergence that we observe. The final punchline that quanta emphasizes of "we put a lot of small things in array and they modelled visual complex behaviors", doesn't sound that surprising in 2023, however amazing/fascinating the overall process and discovery of this may be. As a first step it would be interesting to use/discover tools to study the difference between bird flocking and this type of flocking, if any.
Fascinating!
Where you able to observe balancing while looking in the same axis as the direction of the movement ?
Impressive beautiful creature. 😍 Thanks for sharing your knowledge & the eye candy. 😊 Very cool. 👍💜💚
Fascinating.
did anyone see the pattern matched the van Gogh painting at 4:36 ? or was it just me!
Reminds me a bit of Lenia - an artificial life project that implements a continuous version of Conway's game of life. Panpsychism might be a thing after all, what if even trichoplax is conscious?
Emergence is a thing it seems
Emerging from cells
amazing
Wow! This is rad!
very interesting.
What might this seemingly co-ordinated movement say about intellegence ? What might it possibly imply about consiiousness ?
Wild stuff!
Yo, Guys know what the intro music genre use in this & bunch of other documentary called? Thanks
I've been trying to find it for 2 years lol
Penrose and Hammeroff say that the cilia contain microtubules that also exist in neurons. It is these microtubules that are responsible for consciousness and control behavior.
This kind of reminds me of how metronomes synchronize on a free moving base
Hmm but what coordinates them to move as one? What I got in this video is that the individual cilia are for some reason all working together to "walk" the organism without a nervous system...but what stimuli causes them to group together?
eM / Their creation is the mechanical antagonistic reaction to a real material exterior action.
Cilia "move" mechanically through just proximity contact of succesive repetition of the same "inorganic" stressor ( or any other kind of "stressor" ).
So, nothing coordinates them but the exterior inorganic medium and their own "movement" reaction to main mechanical action.
The dynamic is like this : the mechanical stressor touches one or more cilia, cilia touch other cilia and all of these create a natural average movement mostly ( on average ) in one direction.
Etc.
@@mikel4879 thank you, that helps
eM / 👍
we can learn from all scales of this rule. corrolating bird Flocks to cells. from bird wings to aircraft technology,
AKA: as above, so below.
Great video, and very informative. But, perhaps we can avoid the term "living fossil"? It's ill suited to description, and promotes misconception of core concepts in Biology.
This is a wonderful example of a distributed centralized (authoritarian) system. Basically a democracy. Everyone follows the same rules, leading to some sort of predictable output. These work great for any group project where a collective has a shared goal, and wants to combine resources to get there more efficiently. As long as they are consensual/voluntary, they are ideal solutions for such collective projects. We see this with things like creative workshops, healthy households, Bitcoin, and friends going out to a movie together.
This is in contrast to the two other types of systems. One being non-distributed (totalitarian) systems, which only work well when it's just one living organism working with non-living stuff, like my taking my bicycle for a trip, or a builder collecting rocks to build a wall out of. The third possible system is the fully decentralized (chaotic) system where all members are freely doing what they want, with no global set of rules. This is normal life for natural ecosystems, and is what we tend to prefer for the cells in our bodies, and our bodies on a planet.
WHAT!!!! 🤯🤯🤯🤯
That has been my experience through the entire video.
Reminds me of the growth of ideological and political movements
The question of intelligence needs to push boundaries on our understanding of energy
The "actually intelligible" cause-effect of eternal continuity in superimposed resonance function, and thereby default consequences, ie probability convergences beyond precise comprehension, but simply observable with accurate instruments.
I bet Tricholpaxes do not run into each other! Slim mold is far fascinating as it solved a hard problem without a brain!
good too se manu again
it's blow my mind 🤯
6:00 "what is these materials had just the tiniest sliver of intelligence?" Yes
When I saw the title of this video I thought it was going to be about my uncle Jim.
Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong's "The Ancestors Tale 2nd edition" brought me here to see what more can be learned about this incredible species.
This is it.
Stephen Wolfram, the author of A New Kind of Science, have suggested that the world, including the living world, is ruled by very simple sets of rules that give rise to very complex behavior. This seems to be one of those cases.
I do believe those are called “the laws of physics”
Then you didn't get the reference. Wolfram imagine the laws of nature as very simple computer programs, not equations.
great… even the things that do no have brain makes effort to move across and yet here I am struggling to get out of my bed!😌
We as humans are also connected together, we're just out of sync. For now...
"Humans are just a cool thing that dirt does" ~ Michael Stevens
This video feels to me to be a confirmation of this
Dirt is a bit ... Restrictive as to what types of matter we're made of I think, but I like the point of view. Even though I don't think it's that simple
@@quintenstevens3710 Dirt is a very non-specific phrase. But the gist is that humans are just interesting chemistry.
Humans are just very highly processed hydrogen and helium
So what was the secret?
remain me the book : out of control from Kevin Kelly
A sort of self-organized, self-acting, self-reacting, distributed intelligence. Interesting to biologists.
But also a fascinating idea to computer scientists who research artificial intelligence. The "big central brain" is old-fashioned IBM-era corporate thinking. Distributed emergent systems promise to be the quicker and smarter path. A form of intelligence which functions more like an anthology than a narrative.
Greetings! To all people of this wonderful community. The common thing among us is we all like development in science and feel happy about it and we contribute in a way everyone... But i need suggestion by you all.. I am very Pasionate about biological Sciences especially in neuroscience and genetics.. I wish to become a scientist 👨🔬 but unable to understand the path of becoming one.. I am interested in research field rather than clinical in my country there is exam called neet for med school entrance.i like medical science but dont wish to pursue a career in it.. Pls suggest other career pathways by which I can pursue career of scientist in medical research.
I don't know what studyevel you have now, or what age, and don't need to know :).
But you can start with a bachelor in biology at university, and specialize through the years according to the disciplines that interest you the most when you have them in class. And then you'll see on the way. Keep informing yourself. There are many websites for orientation, and you can also look on the website of the universities themselves. they have a list of bachelors and masters available, with a description and also the name of the courses they contain. Anyway, that is how things go in France. I'm studying in France now (I live there).
good luck discovering what exists !
we've known this for a century and a half. where you been?
Idk that the part where the researcher says they are working as a whole instead of individually is at all the case. They have evolved to perform a function and that’s all it seems to me they are doing here without any regard to what the rest of the organism wants. Would avoidance of a predator or danger be classified as intelligence and even more so, some higher intelligence that it appears they are inferring here? Perhaps and perhaps even more so as that is indeed behavior of the whole rather than a function of the individual component. But that’s my point. The movement of the cilia are what they are supposed to do.
One important thing for science to realize is that all living things - in fact, all matter - is formed of and by consciousness. All organisms have consciousness and the intent of value fulfilment! (Not merely a survival instinct!)
What about viruses
introduction to swarm algorithms
سبحان الله الخالق العظيم
Positive and negative cycles, who would have guessed?
this remind me of the "flood" in halo. A creative pipe dream that could be "realistic".
i think theres more question to answer about these organism. the sole evidence of them being alive means not a lacking of certain orgam but how they satisfy their needs to be alive.
I mean if a single cell can do it then a few thousand definitely can
So its kinda a steampunk robot instead of a digital robot . (Metaphorically speaking....)
Pendulums find resonance. Piano timers eventually coordinate.
Mechanical order.
Seems like these are intelligent in the same way a rube Goldberg machine is intelligent
👍
Maybe we have been asking the wrong questions about how life emerges. Many people believe that something is either alive or dead, and that there's some "animating force" (god?) that gives it a spark of life.
Perhaps the better question is to ask "how alive is something"? This question puts "aliveness" on a spectrum from vanishingly small (with zero as a theoretical, but ultimately unreachable limit) to "very alive" (like a flying hummingbird).
Similarly, we might ask not "whether" something is intelligent (or even conscious), but rather how intelligent or conscious is it?
This leaves room for substances that we have previously thought of as "dead" to actually exhibit some of the most fundamental aspects of what we call "living".
So the question with placazoa isn't whether they are intelligent or conscious (because they have intelligence somewhere along that scale of nearly none to a whole lot), but how intelligent are they?
You can see where this is going: if you think this way, then the entire existence becomes "alive", "intelligent" or "conscious" (even if it's very close to zero on our scale). The question is not "whether", but "how much"?
This is sort of like the quantum vacuum: you don't ask whether it has energy or not, because all quantum vacuums do (even in their ground state). You ask '"how much energy does it have" and "how does that affect it's properties and behavior"?
I believe that this is the line of questioning you are seeing in this research.
Whilst idk how much I agree with the concept of that scale, I must say it’d be nice to finally have a place for viruses in the grand scheme of what counts as life
Makes you wonder if there may be other animal phyla out there not yet discovered by science. Guess they are no longer considered the sister group of cnidarians. Looks like it belongs somewhere between porifera and ctenophora.
Actually, they aren’t technically animals from what I’ve heard. They’re more basal than sponges, but not quite as primitive as choanoflagellates
@@oberonpanopticon They are definitely animals. They have hox-genes and all. Ctenophores are probably more basal than sponges, but are also animals.
Cilias; the atoms of group thinking mentality model
Wow😃🇨🇦
like an analog computer
what is the definition of brain, probably can answer this question
Biomachines, son
,Son.
Great video, but these organisms are no nearer the base of the tree than humans are. Species near the base of the tree lived a long time ago. Species alive today all sit at the very tips of the tree, by definition.
Whilst that’s true, it’s likely that they more closely resemble the organisms that first became animals than us humans do. They’re more basal, as it were.
Flocks of Birds, Schools of Fish, groups of cyclist in uncontrolled trafic in Vietnam, Fire flys ...........
I don't think It's mechanical. Intelligence is a property of life, even single cells display remarkable problem solving abilities and environmental awareness.
to a naturalist, all things are mechanical: neurons are just a collection of certain chemicals responding in a certain way. 'Neuron' is a matter of classification.
but all cells are like neurons: they sense a change, and they react accordingly.
Whether this is intelligence, is again a another issue of classification
@@hareecionelson5875 our understanding may be based on classification, but cells in themselves and the molecular activity that drives them proves to be intelligent, dynamic, able to solve novel perturbations not encountered naturally (able to alter the genome with precision to adapt to toxins never encountered before.)
@@DALibby127 The cells you're talking about are the product of 3.8 billion years of evolution: the cells have been forced to develop the machinery that allows them to respond to their environment
entire lineages of cells can 'learn': natural selection is only trial and error.
The two options are: adapt through spontaneous mutation, or go extinct.
But individual cells are not intelligent: there is no decision making at any point from the sensory input to the motor output.
The cell is a collection of chemical algorithms: If this, then do this. If that, then do that.
On a larger scale, our own brains are the same: sensation goes in, motor output comes out. that's not to denigrate the complexity of the human brain: the algorithms are of course very complex, perhaps the most complex thing in the universe.
my imagination right now is to put the mitochondrions on the chicken egg, so probably the egg can be moving
Nanomachines, son.
it reminds me of octopus having brains in its legs
but how do you communicate across different organisms with such precision?
i think they have invented wifi
you might call that telepathy
i would
Pardon me but unfreekinunbeleavable 🇨🇦
Omg, God created the animal worlds with multiple legs, then he almost ate them all. Now I can understand why spider has 8 legs.
💯🙏🏽🤩
we gotta stop using the word 'intelligence' so liberally, like it confuses us because we look at these microorganisms, and ask how can they behave intelligently -- in the sense of being able to accomplish their goals with efficiency -- but then we say OH but there's no brain, and brains are the source of intelligence. the whole thing reeks of misunderstandings -- and indeed thinking in terms of computation will help us navigate this semantic landscape, but first and foremost we must be aware of the subliminal effect informal language can have on our intuitions.
Indeed. Of course intelligence is a cool label to put on something and it certainly helps when trying to get attention foe your research, but I think it is not justified here: Intelligence is not just solving a problem. Stupid systems solve problems all the time just by following the laws of physics (e.g. by growing into crystals) or by having involved into systems from which exactly the kind of complex behavior emerges that is of advantage a certain environment.
Intelligence is acquiring knowledge, understanding it and using it intentionally on a problem. Not just processing data or being a complex system with emergent self-x properties. Our brain and its neurons are also functioning this way, but just because it is the same orinciple it does not make the outcome the same. The opposite is true: There is a qualitiative difference: Intelligence emerges from the interactions of many neurons who evolved to there. But that does not mean that everything that emrges from such interactions and can adress or solve a problem is automatically intelligent.
@@meingutername2158 You have not defined 'intelligence' very clearly at all, and your qualitative argument has no substance beyond your insistence that we are intelligent when other systems aren't. You have said what you believe does NOT qualify intelligence, but that is insufficient.
The way I see it, intelligence is what I said, accomplishing goals efficiently. Unfortunately the word 'goals' here is about as vague as your use of the word 'intention'. You can say a degree of computational sophistication sufficient to model one's own problems, and simulate their solutions, before trying it out in the real world qualifies as intelligent behavior, but that discredits highly complex systems like ant colonies that have, as you say, simply 'emerged'. However, in my definition, ant colonies do solve many problems with near optimality -- such as the traveling salesman analogue.
If you step back from the individual ant, or colony however, you see how over millennia these organisms have preformed non-trivial searches in the problem space in order to converge on a near-optimal solution - analogous to a genetic algorithm. You should then realize this is not unlike how we behave, and how we converge on solutions to our own problems. In this definition then the 'goal' is survival, provided by the criteria for evolution by natural selection, and it is also not unlike how our neurons themselves try and fail to improve the workings of the brain.
Generally speaking then you do not need a brain to behave 'intelligently', and indeed all life forms are behaving intelligent, according to my definitions. Something like a 'crystal' growing does not accomplish anything in favor of the crystal itself as it will wear away eventually anyway -- moreover, as you say, it is following crude laws of physics, and nothing more, unlike organic life forms which have over millennia, in a sense, stitched these simple laws together in such a way that they preform self-regulating tasks of highly nontrivial complexity (such as a protein folding RNA).
This video is quite weak, because it ignores about 50 years of scientific progress. It is known since decades that simple (e.g. mechanical) interactions can produce emergent complex behaviour with self-x properties (lile self-organization or self-optimization, such properties are typical). Not only known, but also desribed mathematically. In the 70ies Prigogine won a nobel prize for that. What is presented here as sensation is indeed very interesting and fascinating, but it is in its principle not sensationally new but well-known.
Also quite irritating is the use of the word intelligence. Yes there are parallels to how neurons work, interact and produce complex behaviour and that is a fascinating discovery. But to be clear: Complex behavior or self-organization is not intelligence, even if it solves or adresses a problem. It doesn't do that intentionally but just behaves this way (and as a biological system evolved there). Just like the stars have not the intelligence to solve a multi-body-problem, instead they just follow basic laws of physics (gravity). A bunch of neurons or neuron-like mechanisms ist not yet intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge, understand it and use it (to adress a problem). It is not just processing data or being able to adress a problem because it was of evolutionary advantage to have the paramters of certain basic interactions evolving that way.
But of course, that brings up the classic problem of when intelligence begins. How many neurons, how many connections, and of what types? We can safely say that a single molecule isn’t intelligent. We can say that whilst incredibly complex, a unicellular organism isn’t intelligent. But what about a sponge? A flatworm? We like to think we’re intelligent, but that’s because we’re the ones who defined what intelligence is.
So basically you are finding how my best friend exists?
I do not like the fact that it walks.
Ask ˹them, O Prophet˺, “Who is the Lord of the heavens and the earth?” Say, “Allah!” Ask ˹them˺, “Why ˹then˺ have you taken besides Him lords who cannot even benefit or protect themselves?” Say, “Can the blind and the sighted be equal? Or can darkness and light be equal?”1 Or have they associated with Allah partners who ˹supposedly˺ produced a creation like His, leaving them confused between the two similar creations? Say, “Allah is the Creator of all things, and He is the One, the Supreme.”
Noble Qur'an, chapter 13, named "Ar-Ra'd" means Thunder, verse 16.
Oh my bad, I thought this was about Trump.
Intelligence? How intelligent is a river? These people ask the most improper questions!
The kind step-uncle unquestionably whisper because astronomy expectedly grin into a hysterical turret. giant, handsomely john
God is terrified .
why?
God Is Greatest
Joe Biden
Strategize how to find food? Really? They describe the simple dynamic process that gives rise to what we would call coordinated behavior, but then dive into the deep end of the pool with wild extrapolations. *slaps the back of their hand with a ruler* No. Bad scientist.
Great video, and very informative. But, perhaps we can avoid the term "living fossil"? It's ill suited to description, and promotes misconception of core concepts in Biology.