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What's a Brain?
On bacterial, cellular, and other minimal minds.
It holds memories, harbors love, shocks with fear, awe, and pain; it works over the raw input of the senses, smoothing the chemical signals, wavelengths of light, vibrations and electrical messages it receives into a cogent picture of its realm. The same an unnamed scribe first etched into papyrus some 3,500 years ago (searching for the right hieroglyph, he chose “skull-marrow,” something to scoop out when the time comes for mummification, favoring that glorified muscle, the heart, for transport into the realms of the Dead). When the popular press covers slime molds, they tend to emphasize how remarkable these brainless organisms are at seemingly human tasks—like, famously, recreating Tokyo’s regional commuter rail network.
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