Michael Levin

So here's your planaria.

You cut off the head.

You cut off the tail.

You have a middle fragment.

That middle fragment has to make one head and one tail.

How does it know how many of each to make and where do they go?

How come it doesn't switch?

How come, right?

So we did a very simple thing and we said, okay, let's make the hypothesis that there's a somatic electrical network that remembers the correct pattern.

And then what it's doing is recalling that memory and building to that pattern.

So what we did was we used a way to visualize electrical activity in these cells, right?

It's a variant of what people use to look for electricity in the brain.

And we saw that it has a that that fragment has a very, very particular electrical pattern.

You can literally see it once once we developed the technique.

It has a very particular electrical pattern that shows you where the head and the tail goes.

Right.

You can you can just see it.

And then we said, OK, well, now let's test the idea that that's a memory that actually controls where the head and the tail goes.

Let's change that pattern.

So basically incept a false memory.