Michael Levin

speaker

450 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Michael Levin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Mind-Body Solution with Dr Tevin Naidu · Terrence Deacon & Michael Levin: What is Life? Complexity, Cognition & the Origin of Purpose · 9 May 2025 podcast

W what I was looking for is the encoding of the set point.

Not not magic, but nevertheless, any homeostatic uh s system has to have somewhere you have to store, you have to have a memory of of what what what it is that you're reducing error against, right?

There's some sort of error minimization in the scheme.

So I was looking for that.

So it turns out

That both in planaria uh head tail decisions and in the frog face, if you look very early before all the genes come on that are gonna regionalize the face and all that, there's a bi so so let's just talk about the frog face for a second.

There's a bioelectrical pattern.

Which is readily decodable.

And there are many other patterns that we are working hard to decode, and some are very hard.

But the frog face one.

It looks like a face.

You can tell exactly here's where the eyes are going to go, here's where the mouth is going to go, here where the placods out to the side are going to be.

And and sure enough, if you move any of those uh voltage states, not the cells, the voltage states, and we can do that with optogenetics and with other tools.

If you move any of those things, the gene expression follows and the anatomy follows.

And so you can, and in the planarian, it's the same thing.

We if you cut a fragment and you say, How does this thing know how many heads it's supposed to have?

There's an actual voltage pattern that says one head and one tail.

And I mean, now we know that it that that's what it says.

And if you artificially change it to say two heads, sure enough, you get a worm with with two heads.

And uh and and and parenthetically, if you then start chopping those worms, you forevermore will get two-headed worms, even though the genetics are still completely wild type, right?

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