Sep 22, 2019 03:53 PM
https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-heal...-1.7872066
EXCERPT: Trained dogs will salivate at the sound of a dinner bell, Ivan Pavlov famously discovered by accident in the 1890s. If the dogs realize that a peal portends food, they will drool at its sound and not only when the meal materializes. That is called conditioning. Now, a multidisciplinary group of Israeli and Spanish scientists found evidence that amoebas can be conditioned too — which was quite the shocker given that they are one-celled animals with no brain.
... What they [the amoebas] were doing is remembering the way to food for up to 90 minutes, report ... Shira Knafo of Ben-Gurion University ... and others, with disciplines encompassing mathematics, cancer research and pathology. Their groundbreaking study was published in the journal Nature.
... Amoebas have never been suspected of smarts. Nor are they now. Knafo and her colleagues suspect the associative memory of the avenue to food is biochemical: temporarily encoded in a network of proteins. Associative memory — the ability to learn and remember a consistent relationship between unrelated things, such as a sound and steak — was thought to be the prerogative of animals that have nervous systems. ... It has not been demonstrated in unicellular species, until now.
... The experiment was repeated with another one-celled animal, Metamoeba leningradensis, a cousin to the simple amoebas we know and love. The same results ensued. Now the team is working on four more amoeba species, Knafo told Haaretz. Since this “memory of how to find food” has now been found in two amoeba species, one may suspect that it’s universal. However, it is early days and, yes, the team does plan, generally, to test for the phenomenon in other unicellular species before seriously postulating its universality. (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: Trained dogs will salivate at the sound of a dinner bell, Ivan Pavlov famously discovered by accident in the 1890s. If the dogs realize that a peal portends food, they will drool at its sound and not only when the meal materializes. That is called conditioning. Now, a multidisciplinary group of Israeli and Spanish scientists found evidence that amoebas can be conditioned too — which was quite the shocker given that they are one-celled animals with no brain.
... What they [the amoebas] were doing is remembering the way to food for up to 90 minutes, report ... Shira Knafo of Ben-Gurion University ... and others, with disciplines encompassing mathematics, cancer research and pathology. Their groundbreaking study was published in the journal Nature.
... Amoebas have never been suspected of smarts. Nor are they now. Knafo and her colleagues suspect the associative memory of the avenue to food is biochemical: temporarily encoded in a network of proteins. Associative memory — the ability to learn and remember a consistent relationship between unrelated things, such as a sound and steak — was thought to be the prerogative of animals that have nervous systems. ... It has not been demonstrated in unicellular species, until now.
... The experiment was repeated with another one-celled animal, Metamoeba leningradensis, a cousin to the simple amoebas we know and love. The same results ensued. Now the team is working on four more amoeba species, Knafo told Haaretz. Since this “memory of how to find food” has now been found in two amoeba species, one may suspect that it’s universal. However, it is early days and, yes, the team does plan, generally, to test for the phenomenon in other unicellular species before seriously postulating its universality. (MORE - details)