Are You Smarter Than Slime?
Heather Barnett has spent the last decade investigating how an organism with no brain can solve problems, anticipate events and navigate efficiently — what can humans learn from slime?
Interview By: Justin Harlow | Editor
Justin Harlow: Today, I’m here with the artist, researcher and educator Heather Barnett. Heather works with natural phenomena, complex systems and biological design to help better understand the world around us. She’s held Research Fellowships at prestigious universities such as the London School of Economics, been exhibited in many of the world’s leading museums, including the Victoria & Albert and served as an accomplished Artist in Residence.
It’s an incredible resume, which makes it even more fascinating, that she’s probably best known for her relationship with…..slime. Specifically, a slime mold known formally as Pyhsarum Polycephalum. She first encountered slime mold when her microbiologist friend presented her with a yellow blob in a petri-dish and invited her to go and play with it. I don’t know if you could say it was love at first sight, but since then she’s spent the last decade investigating how an organism with no brain or central nervous system can solve problems, anticipate events and navigate efficiently — skills most humans I know would be well advised to learn.
Heather, it’s great to have you with us today.
Heather Barnett: Hello!
Justin Harlow: So when did you first develop your interest in living organisms?
Heather Barnett: I think I’ve always been interested in living organisms. I remember as a child I was fascinated by what happened underneath the skin. I used to get up early on Sunday mornings and go and watch open-heart surgery on TV before my family got up. I’ve never been squeamish. I’ve always been fascinated by how things work and what are the mechanisms that drive behaviors. I think I was just attracted to the blood and guts and what was so neat on the outside was so messy and complicated on the inside and yet it all seemed to work most of the time.
Justin Harlow: So, talking about messy and complicated, your friend asks you to take some slime mold home and play with it. What is it and what did you do with it?
Heather Barnett: Slime mold is a single-celled organism, but it joins up with other cells of its kind to form a mass super-cell. So, what you have is lots of nuclei, individual nucleus from different cells, all operating as one super-organism. It can vary in size from something that’s microscopic if it’s just a few cells to something that could be several square meters in size if it’s millions of cells all working together. So, this is a little yellow blob in a petri-dish that I was invited to take home. The only instructions I was given was that it likes it dark and damp and its favorite food was porridge oats.
Justin Harlow: I know people like that [laughter].
Heather Barnett: You know people like that? They like it dark and damp and like porridge oats, yeah, I think we all know a few people like that [laughter].
So, I put it in a shoe-box and watched it, just observed what is was doing. It doesn’t grow very quickly, it’s top speed is about a centimeter per hour. In some biological terms, that’s very fast, but if you’re trying to watch what it’s doing in real-time, it’s very slow. So, I started doing very crude time-lapse studies, taking photographs at intervals to kind of see what it was doing. And, that’s when the behavior started to reveal itself, through the time-lapse photography, because you’re speeding up what it’s doing and through these observations I was really intrigued. It seemed to be moving with intention, it seemed to be making quite reasonable decisions about what it was doing. So, my study with it just started by observing it in the studio and trying to learn from it, but while I was doing that I was also reading up on it and I found this world of research asking questions of this organism. It ranged from all sorts of different disciplines, which I’m sure we’ll discuss in the conversation.
Justin Harlow: So. let’s talk about the experiments that slime mold has been an active participant in. One of the things that I loved about your TED Talk was your illustration of the Tokyo transportation network. Could you give us more detail on how that experiment worked and some other experiments out there that have used slime mold as the basis for explanation?
Heather Barnett: We could be here a very long time. On my last look on Google Scholar if you’re just searching for academic papers, there are over 50,000 published articles about slime mold. But, there are some really classic experiments that have then inspired further experiments and have inspired all sorts of not only scientific research, but also artistic research or philosophical query as well.
So, you mentioned the Tokyo transport system and that was an experiment performed in 2010 by a team of scientific researchers and they essentially mapped out the rail system around Tokyo. So, instead of a station, you would have an oat. They started the slime mold off in Tokyo and it grew. I need to paint the picture of how the slime mold grows. So, it branches out when it’s looking for food and when it finds food it forms a network. It rationalizes and forms a network between the food nodes. So, the stations were the food nodes for the slime mold and it grew out and collected all the stations and formed this efficient network between them. And, after a period of just over a day of growth across this area, they overlaid that on top of the actual Tokyo transport network and it was highly accurate. It had replicated the Tokyo transport system. So, the Japanese transportation system took it as a great accolade that the slime mold agreed with what they’d been doing. What had taken them decades if not centuries of civil engineering, and urban planning, and negotiation, the slime mold did in just over a day.
It’s a very efficient networker. So, a lot of computer scientists are interested in working out, how it is making those calculations to optimize those networks, which is useful in human terms if you imagine large distribution companies sending tankers of oils to multiple destinations. There are a lot of companies that are using biological algorithms, whether they’re from slime mold or ant colonies to look at how they could make more efficient distribution systems at a human scale.
Justin Harlow: Tell us a little bit about your ‘Nodes & Networks’ project, which I believe was another slime mold experiment in New York City that helped inform how we think about collective behavior and city living. What was that project and what were the main takeaways?
Heather Barnett: Essentially, it was an interdisciplinary experiment. So, that meant we invited artists, scientists, urban planners, engineers and ecologists, anybody who was interested in network systems and how complex networks operate at different scales. People were interested from a slime mold scale. Others were interested at looking at transport systems where the experiment was conducted in New York. Really, we were looking at the city as a super-organism and relating how systems work at a city level, at a human level and at a slime mold level and seeing what relationships we could find between them. Those networks took place over several days with a core team of artists, designers and scientists working together to devise public experiments. We then invited the public along and we just had a full day of experiments.
Experiments involved working in the laboratory, so we created maps of the New York City boroughs where we were looking at this idea of attractants and repellants. At a borough scale, what would be an attractant or repellant in your area? People were encouraged to think about it from their own preferences. Some people were talking about the process of gentrification in Queens and whether a coffee bar would be an attractant and they’d place oats where all the new coffee bars were. Or crime may be a repellant or pollution. So, they were making maps for the slime mold to explore, but thinking about what would be an attractant or repellant at a human scale.
Slime mold went about exploring these new maps while we went out exploring and did some collective behavior experiments in Central Park, where we tried to follow some slime mold rules to see if we could cooperate and navigate as efficiently as slim mold could. Then we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and did some culture foraging experiments where we followed people and observed how they interacted with their environment and what they were attracted to in art terms. So, it was a range of different experiments working with the slime mold as a material, modeling its behaviors and using it as inspiration for looking at very human systems.
Justin Harlow: That’s fascinating. As a Brooklyn resident I have to ask you, with respect to urban planning, did we have more oats than Manhattan or more paprika?
Heather Barnett: All the boroughs had a mixture. I think that I recall Brooklyn being discussed in terms of gentrification because there is a lot going on in Brooklyn.
Justin Harlow: When you said “discussed”, I thought you were going to say “disgusting”. [laughter]
Heather Barnett: No, no, no. “Discussed” as in talked about, not disgusted. I think Brooklyn was celebrated for having a lot of green space, which was attractive for the slime mold as it gave it room to roam.
Justin Harlow: I heard you mention elsewhere that one of the main benefits of this project was that slime mold gave biological shape to human concerns. I guess it gave issues that we generally talk about a visual framework. Why do you think that was so powerful?
Heather Barnett: I think we forget that we are biological. So, we are behaving in some similar ways to a non-human biological entity. I think what the slime mold offers is something that is very alien to us, it’s a yellow nomadic blob that’s quite pretty as it creeps around and it’s very alien to how we see ourselves, yet it displays behaviors that we can relate to. It can learn, it can remember, it can anticipate events. So, it taps into our curiosity of how something so simple could be doing all these things. For me, I see it as a vehicle. If we look through the “eyes” of the slime mold, we can then look at ourselves in different ways. We’re kind of stepping outside of ourselves. Due to human exceptionalism, we think we’re very separate from other living systems around us, but we are one species among many thousands and millions of species that co-exist.
Justin Harlow: I guess if you were looking at this from an urban planning perspective and not even the slime mold wants to move into your area that may be a basis for necessary change in any given location!
Heather Barnett: Well, I think it may be the other way around. If it wanted to move into your area you may be worried, because it likes dark, damp and not particularly nice environments preferred by most humans I know.
Justin Harlow: You mentioned before about all the disciplines that have gotten involved in this research. Are there any disciplines sitting on the sidelines that you would love to get involved in this slime mold initiative?
Heather Barnett: I think that’s really difficult. So many disciplines are involved and that’s one of the reasons I find it so attractive and keep coming back to it, because it does offer so many ways to ask questions about how things are working. Lots of areas of science are working on it, from computer science, to robotics to biosciences, physics and mathematics are interested, engineering, architecture, art & design, urban planning, philosophy, even politics. There is a burgeoning political party in the UK that’s taking inspiration from the slime mold. Maybe politics is the one area that could really benefit from serious investigation into how slime mold works and makes decisions. I’m thinking of some recent collective decision-making examples both in the UK and the US that could have maybe benefited from slime mold intelligence!
Justin Harlow: You mentioned robots just now and computer science. I personally take a very broad view on diversity, but I have to admit that I generally restrict it to humans. That’s probably until I came across you. I’m not saying you’re not a human, I’m talking about the slime mold [laughter]. I guess if there’s a discussion to be had around the role of robots and artificial intelligence, we should probably be spending as much of our attention on biological intelligence too. What do you think about that?
Heather Barnett: Well, I think that a lot of artificial intelligence is drawing directly from biological intelligence. I briefly mentioned the algorithms that are derived from observations of biological phenomena and extracting the computational rules behind biological behavior. And, I think there is definitely a step towards making more firm connections between how these systems work at different levels, between the biological, technological and social. That’s certainly something that I’m interested in.
Justin Harlow: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that slime mold operates at a far greater capacity than the sum of its parts. Why is that and what could humans learn from it?
Heather Barnett: The phrase that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is often used to refer to systems that have principles of emergence at their core. What that means is that from quite simple elements that are individually stupid or incapable of doing things, through a few particular processes, complexity and complex behavior can emerge. If they are interacting with each other and they have open communication mechanisms and an easy flow of information, then an intelligence can arise from that.
So, within these emergent systems you usually don’t have any hierarchy or very low hierarchy, so control is distributed across the system and there’s an ability within that system to recognize patterns. Through these interactions and feedback loops, pattern recognition emerges and that’s where the intelligence lies. If you think about an ant colony and how trails are formed through interactions of multiple ants communicating through pheromones, they get constant feedback about the environment and that builds up an intelligence of what’s happening in that environment. Then you get the intelligence of the colony. Each individual ant is very stupid, but the colony as a whole is an incredibly intelligent thing.
Justin Harlow: That leads nicely into the next question. So, you talk about interaction and that made me start thinking about teams, teams in the workplace, organizational design, but also sports. What do you think sports teams could learn from slime mold?
Heather Barnett: There’s a balance between cooperation and competition in slime mold which I think relates to team play. In human organizational systems, there are a lot of people interested in how hierarchy works and how information is distributed, and also autonomy and agency within organizations.
Within sports teams I think the same things apply. If you take a football team, there’s a tacit knowledge that you get that isn’t talking to your team members. You understand what other parts of this collective body are doing when it’s working. When it’s not working is when individual players are not communicating and they don’t understand what each other is doing. When you see a football team working, it’s when they’re working as a collective body and they have this tacit understanding and they somehow know what the other players are doing and it all kind of aligns.
Justin Harlow: So, if we look at human behavior in a broader way, you’ve described some behaviors in slime mold that would be valuable traits for humans. You’ve mentioned collective interest, you’ve mentioned how slime mold can learn from its mistakes, what other behaviors do you think that slime mold exhibits that would be valuable human traits?
Heather Barnett: It’s life cycle is something that I’m very jealous of. It can choose what to do when the conditions aren’t right. We just kind of have one option really, we just die. But, if the conditions aren’t right for slime mold, it can either dry up into a scab-like state and wait for better times or it can grow fruiting bodies that have spores which then get taken on the wind and find better lands. So, that’s a damn good trick that would be nice to have. In terms of its traits, it really is an incredibly curious organism. It’s constantly seeking new adventures. So, even when it finds food, it doesn’t all sit on the food, part of it will still be exploring, while part of it is digesting. It is nomadic and it’s constantly seeking new territories and I think a lot of humans are incredibly curious, but I think some aren’t and I think could be more curious.
Justin Harlow: So, let’s explore the problem-solving capacities of smile mold that you’ve alluded to in some of the experiments we’ve spoken about earlier. I’m going to read out two or three examples, but I’d love to hear any examples you have of where slime can really think differently to solve our most stubborn challenges. The first one I’d like to discuss is the spread of “fake news”. Is there anything that slime mold can teach us, or help us in our understanding, about why that’s been such a problem in our society in the last couple of years?
Heather Barnett: OK, how would slime mold deal with fake news? What a weird and interesting question. I think I would answer that by saying that a lot of the problems with communication and news come from us operating within what we perceive as being open information networks, but that are actually quite closed information networks. You have what people refer to the bubble chamber of Facebook or those kind of social media outlets where we’re just really hearing what other people who share our views think, which leads to a false idea of perceptions and opinions. Slime mold does not operate like that. It has a permeable membrane. It’s always open to information input, no matter what that information is and I think that would help resolve the fake news or echo chamber issue.
Justin Harlow: OK, another challenge. What could slime mold teach us about the continual pollution of our environment?
Heather Barnett: You could almost use slime mold as a barometer of air quality because it is communicating through chemical signals, so it will pick up quite complex information about the environment, so, you could use slime mold quite literally as a barometer of pollution. It will also change its level based on alkaline levels, so, it could be a quite useful tool in that way.
Justin Harlow: I’m seeing miners in a mine replacing yellow canaries with yellow slime mold.
Heather Barnett: Yeah, yeah, that could potentially work, I think. [laughter] And, it would quite like it down there, because it would be dark and quite damp. It would probably be quite happy.
Justin Harlow: What about the perpetuation of war? What could slime mold teach us about that problem in our society?
Heather Barnett: Oh, God. Can slime mold solve war? Probably not, because slime mold wars are going on all the time anyway. You have rivalry between the species. One of the studies I did was introducing a Danish slime mold called Badania to my dainty little Pyhsarum Polycephalum. The Danish slime mold was like a giant Viking invader steaming across the petri-dish, mine had to run away and hide, but it was quite canny, it hid under an oat and then escaped around the other side. It was quite good at evading the invader. So, I don’t know if slime mold would be useful in helping us avoid any wars, there’s plenty of warfare going on in biological terms. I’m certainly not someone who believes all nature is lovely. It’s just operating at a different level of warfare to us.
Justin Harlow: So, if you had unlimited resources and could involve anybody or anything, what would your dream slime project look like?
Heather Barnett: OK, it would be a huge, great multi-disciplinary hackathon-type event, where you’ve got great minds from different disciplines all coming together to work on a shared project or question. So, it would like the ‘Nodes & Networks’ and other projects that I’ve done, but on a much grander scale. So, you would have loads of curious, clever, creative people working together. What would come out of it? As well as it being just wonderful intellectual fun in itself, it would be an immersive installation that would invite people to enter the world of another living entity and in that world they would be engaged physically and all their senses would be heightened. They would enter the world of the slime mold and I would create this artwork that just took people into this other realm of existence and spat them out the other side having changed in some way and hopefully coming out of the other side as a better human being. [laughter]
Justin Harlow: That’s a very noble quest.
Heather Barnett: It’s an aspiration. [laughter] I do think we’re deeply-flawed as a species. In many ways we do amazing things, we have created incredible things, but we’re also the only species that actively destroys its own habitat. And, that’s why I think I’m drawn to these other non-human organisms, because I think they have far greater respect for their habitat and environment than we do.
Justin Harlow: Well, Heather, this has been fascinating. Before we met, I never thought I could learn from slime and you’ve definitely changed my opinion there. I’m thinking of all the mistakes I’ve made in my life and what slime mold would have done, but it’s great to know that we can draw inspiration from many different places. I really appreciate your time today, it’s been an incredible interview.
Heather Barnett: You’re welcome.
