Michael Levin

A system that uses all of that is really highly evolvable, and that's fantastic.

But guess what?

It's also highly subject to hijacking by parasites, by cheaters of various kinds, by conspecifics.

We found that, and that goes back to the story of the pattern memory in these planaria, there's a bacterium that lives on these planaria.

That bacterium has an input into how many heads the worm is going to have.

because it's hijacks that, that control system.

And it's able to make a chemical that basically interfaces with the system that calculates how many heads you're supposed to have.

And they can have two and they can make them have two heads.

And so you can imagine that if you are too, so you want to be understandable for your own parts to understand each other, but you don't want to be too understandable because you'll be too easily controllable.

And so I think that, that, um, my guess is that, that, um, that, that, that, that opposing pressure keeps this from being a super high bandwidth kind of thing where we can just look at somebody and know, you know, everything about

Yeah.

One of the ways to start thinking about bioelectricity is to ask ourselves, where did neurons and all these cool tricks that the brain uses to run these amazing problem solving abilities on and basically an electrical network?

Where did that come from?

That didn't just evolve up here out of nowhere.

It must have evolved from something.

And what it evolved from was a much more ancient ability of cells to form networks to solve other kinds of problems.

For example, to navigate more for space, to control the body shape.

And so all of the components

of neurons.

So ion channels, neurotransmitter machinery, electrical synapses, all this stuff is way older than brains, way older than neurons, in fact, older than multicellularity.