Are You Smarter Than A Slime Mold?

With all 86 billion neurons at our disposal, humans are pretty smart beings. We are the most intelligent species on the planet. But what about lesser species, say, how smart is a pulsating wad of yellow gue?
Physarum polycephalum, or better known as slime mold, can be found sometimes on stale bread but it is not a fungus, it is a jelly-like protist. Best is to imagine it as one big cell holding millions of nuclei and they might seem like much but slime molds are smarter than they look. Just watch the video.

Slime molds can solve mazes. It does so by first exploring every path and then when it has found the food at every end, it retracts the paths that don't connect the points. Solving mazes involves remembering where you have been. Where does a single cell ball of bread hold memories? Physarum does this by leaving chemical trails to mark dead ends, so it can remember where it has already explored. When slime molds are presented with a maze that has more than one solution, they will even figure out the shortest one. No matter the shape of the maze, they will almost always manage to connect the distributed food sources by the shortest path.

If that does not impress you, realize that once you start adding points, mapping efficient networks becomes an incredibly complex problem and humans use powerful computers to accomplish just the same.
What other wonders can this simple organism accomplish? We wouldn’t want to spoil your fun by saying anything more! Grab yourselves a cup of coffee and enjoy the rest of the video!