Michael Levin

You can't get past them.

Now imagine if what you could do is you could leak your stress, whatever your stress molecule is.

And the cool thing is that evolution has actually conserved these highly.

So these are all, and we're studying all of these things.

They're actually highly conserved.

If you start leaking your stress molecules, then all of this stuff around here is starting to get stressed out.

When things get stressed, starting to get stressed out, their temperature, not physical temperature, but in the sense of simulated annealing or something, their plasticity goes up because they're feeling stressed.

They need to relieve that stress.

And because all the stress molecules are the same, they don't know it's not their stress.

they are equally irritated by them as if it was their own stress.

So they become a little more plastic.

They become ready to kind of, you know, adopt different fates.

You get up to where you're going and then everybody's stress can drop.

So notice what can happen by a very simple mechanism.

Just be leaky for your own stress.

My problems become your problems.

Not because you're altruistic, not because you actually care about my problems.

There's no mechanism for you to actually care about my problems.

But just that simple mechanism means that

Far away regions are now responsive to the needs of other regions such that complex rearrangements and things like that can happen.