Michael Levin

You can literally look down and you can see all the all the firings as the fish is like making decisions about what to eat and things like this.

Right.

It's amazing.

Well, your whole body is doing that all the time, just much slower.

So there are very few things that neurons do that other cells, that all the cells in your body don't do.

They all do very similar things, just on a much slower timescale.

And whereas your brain is thinking about how to solve problems in three-dimensional space, the cells in an embryo are thinking about how to solve problems in anatomical space.

They're trying to have memories like, hey, how many fingers are we supposed to have?

Well, how many do we have now?

What do we do to get from here to there?

That's the kind of problems they're thinking about.

And the reason that gap junctions are magic is, imagine, right, from the...

from the earliest time.

Here are two cells.

This cell, how can they communicate?

Well, the simple version is this cell could send a chemical signal.

It floats over and it hits a receptor on this cell, right?

Because it comes from outside, this cell can very easily tell that that came from outside.

Whatever information is coming, that's not my information.

That information is coming from the outside.