We suggest reading Michael Levin’s profile first for a primer on bioelectricity and bioforms. 

Slime moulds – or “demon droppings”, as a 9th century Chinese scholar called them – don’t have eyes, ears, neurons, or a brain. But they can remember, keep time. Find the shortest route to their destination. 

Not impressed yet? They mimicked the highly efficient Tokyo metro system – a legendary marvel of civil engineering and urban planning over decades – within days. 

Other single-cell organisms, too, show capacities to learn. Anticipate. Decide. 

Hallmarks of “intelligence”. 

What does that say about our own 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses packed into “three pounds of goo” – our brain – that have been credited with catapulting the homo sapien to the top of the IQ chart? What makes anything “intelligent”? 

Ask Elena Sergeeva. She’s a neuroscientist working at the crackling intersection of bodies, minds, and AI at the frontier Levin Lab at Tufts. She’s manipulating bioelectricity – currents generated by living cells that may just hold the key for how organisms take shape, develop, grow – to understand their patterns. To be able to one day crack the code to anti-aging. She’s building hybrid computer chips at her co-founded Taimat Labs. Merging mechanical bodies with biological ones. 

Fundamentally? Her work leans into understanding – even manipulating – intelligence beyond brains. And building unconventional kinds. 

Intelligence beyond brains

It’s not just slime mould. Consider a flatworm that’s cut into two. The “head” half will generate the rest of the body. But so will the tail half – including developing a new brain. All thanks to electrical signals passing back and forth between cells. Or consider an ant colony that coordinates activity through chemical signals. Plant roots that sense environmental cues and accordingly adapt. 

We can look within our own human bodies – consider how millions of individual cells coordinate to close wounds. How embryonic cells self-organise to form limbs, organs, tissues. And if an embryo is cut – it’s not a half human that emerges, but two perfect humans – twins. 

Scientists at The Levin Lab identify “intelligence” as the ability to make decisions, solve problems, chase goals. But also, critically – the ability to learn, adapt, and pursue the same goals by different pathways, despite all obstacles. 

The consequences are profound. For how we understand “intelligence". (Maybe even consciousness.) And how the “mind” emerges. Yes, humans are intelligent – but so is a cell. A collection of cells. A swarm of organisms. In other words, call intelligence a scale  of cell competencies: from molecules that make up a single cell all the way up to multi-celled beings.  

And given that behaviour and memory are not coded into only the brain, “intelligence” becomes a universal property – instead of something limited to a brain. 

Intelligence seen this way also has exciting implications for how we think of novel forms – and their consequences for our lives and world. AI, certainly: an eventual separate category of existence? A continuum of intelligence? But also the entire new bodies that the Levin Lab is currently creating – using non-neural frog skin cells, human lung cells. Cleaved from their normal habitats, they show interesting behaviours – and some capability to survive. Adapt. Take action. Find solutions.   

...Hallmarks of intelligence. 

At SYNAPSE 2025, Elena Sergeeva will break ranks with convention. Share how “intelligence” is being redefined. Argue that cognition – just like life – is a spectrum. Share her own experiments with bioelectricity and bioengineering. Explain the brain-breaking implications for our bodies and medicine. Even "life". And break down the binary between human and machine. 

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