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Physarum polycephalum can store information in its body and change how it moves, despite having just one cell and no nervous system. But the evidence does not establish that a complete memory remains intact in both halves after the organism is cut in two.
How can one cell have a memory?
Physarum polycephalum is a slime mold whose plasmodium is one large, connected cell. It has no brain or nervous system, yet researchers have observed behaviors described as memory and learning. In this context, “memory” means that information from an earlier encounter persists in a physical trace or affects later behavior. It does not mean conscious recollection or human-like autobiographical memory.
What the food-location study found
A 2021 study reported that food encounters can leave a structural trace in the organism’s network of tubes. A chemical released at a food location travels through the network and softens tubes. The tubes differ in diameter, and thicker tubes provide faster routes for transport. As a result, the network’s existing arrangement can influence where the organism migrates next. The researchers interpreted this persistent tube-diameter hierarchy as a physical memory of food location. Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization’s account of the study describes the mechanism; the paper appeared in PNAS as “Encoding memory in tube diameter hierarchy of living flow network.”
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This finding concerns food-location history and subsequent directional movement. It does not show that the organism recalls an experience in the way an animal with a brain might.
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A different kind of memory: avoiding explored space
Separate research examined spatial navigation rather than tube architecture. The slime mold avoided areas it had already explored, using its slime trail as an externalized spatial trace. In a U-shaped barrier task, that avoidance helped it navigate toward a goal. This is a distinct result from the food-location study: one concerns a trace in the tube network, while the other concerns a trail left in the environment. The 2012 PNAS study describes the spatial-memory experiment.
Does memory survive when the slime mold is cut in half?
The available account of a divided-plasmodium experiment says that the organism was cut in half and the resulting portions were assigned to different habituation treatments. Habituation is a basic form of non-associative learning: a response changes after repeated exposure to a stimulus. That design addresses how divided portions behave under those treatments. It does not, on the information reported, establish that a complete learned memory persists unchanged in each half.
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So the careful answer is: Physarum can show memory-related behavior without a brain, and divided material has been studied in habituation experiments. The stronger claim that both halves retain the same complete memory after a cut is not established by the evidence described here. The habituation literature likewise treats the behavior as an operational experimental finding, not proof of consciousness or human-like thought. A 2016 review of habituation in non-neural organisms discusses evidence from slime molds.
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Researchers use terms such as memory, learning, and habituation to describe measurable persistence and changes in behavior. In Physarum, those effects can arise from physical structures or environmental traces rather than a nervous system. The terms are useful for explaining what experiments observe, but they should not be mistaken for evidence that the organism consciously remembers.
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