Mind Beyond Matter- Part 1: Minds Without Brains

(00:00:00) Mind Beyond Matter- Part 1: Minds Without Brains
(00:03:34) Mind Without Brains
(00:04:30) Slime Mold
(00:07:23) Mimosa Pudica
(00:09:17) Mushrooms
(00:11:57) Outro

🎙️ Part 1: Mind Without Brains
 ✨ Series: Mind Beyond Matter

Ever met a genius blob?
In this mind-bending premiere of Mind Beyond Matter, we meet creatures that think without a brain. From slime molds that can design subway systems, to plants that remember, learn, and even make decisions. We journey through strange forms of intelligence hiding in plain sight: shy plants that stop flinching, fungi that "talk" underground, and organisms that challenge what it means to know.
Are brains really the only seat of thought? Or is intelligence something more… distributed? Rhythmic? Hidden in places we never thought to look?
From squishy slimes to sentient stems, this episode is a love letter to all the quiet, weird, and wonderful minds of nature.

🧠 Featuring:

• Physarum polycephalum (the Tokyo-dreaming slime mold)
• Mimosa pudica (our very own makahiya)
• Pea plants with Pavlovian instincts
• Forest fungi and the Wood Wide Web

👁️‍🗨️ Prepare to unlearn what you know about intelligence.
 🌱 Because maybe… the world is thinking back.

Thank you for listening and for keeping wonder alive.
Stay curious. Keep your wonder close. 🌙✨

A gentle note:
This episode of the LilWeird Podcast blends science, folklore, thought experiments, and a pinch of poetic speculation. While everything shared is rooted in credible research and genuine curiosity, this isn’t a scientific journal. It’s a storytelling space. So take what resonates, question what doesn’t, and let your mind wander freely. Interpret with care, and most of all, wonder responsibly.


📚 References & Suggested Readings
Nakagaki, T., Yamada, H., & Tóth, Á. (2000). Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism. Nature, 407(6803), 470.
→ This paper explores how a slime mold (Physarum polycephalum) solved a maze using its natural foraging behavior—a mindless organism solving spatial problems that mimic human-designed systems.
Reid, C. R., Latty, T., Dussutour, A., & Beekman, M. (2012). Slime mould uses an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate in complex environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(43), 17490–17494.
→ Shows how slime molds leave behind chemical trails to avoid retracing their steps, effectively demonstrating memory without neurons.
Gagliano, M., Renton, M., Depczynski, M., & Mancuso, S. (2014). Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters. Oecologia, 175(1), 63–72.
→ A groundbreaking study revealing that plants like Mimosa pudica are capable of learning and memory through habituation.
Adamatzky, A. (2022). Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity. Royal Society Open Science, 9(4), 211926.
→ This research suggests that electrical activity in fungi might encode information in a language-like form.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It started with a whisper, a thought that didn't feel
like mine. And no, I wasn't sleeping deprived, Okay, maybe
a little. One night I fell into a rabbit hole.
The guy with no rabbits only topas those strange belief
born being said to be created by imagination so intense
they become independent. I arn stories of people talking to them,

(00:23):
living with them. Some even argue their topas talk back
and settling. Yes, fascinating absolutely, because if you can take
something into existence, if a thought can start to think
on its own, then what else is the mind capable of?
That question is spiraled into dozens more. Can the mind
leave the body? Can something without a brain deside? Can

(00:45):
plants learn? Can mushroom stock? Can slime modes solved? Dock
traffic better than humans? Well, you'll probably never look at
soup the same way again. Welcome to Mind Beyond Matter.
This is a special mini series from the Littwered Body
Gas where we're going way past pop psychology or motivational
brain hacks. This is about intelligence without brains, consciousness without

(01:09):
a person, and reality shape I thought itself. We'll explore
minds in nature, the challenge that it means to think,
ancient mental techniques like memory palaces, by your resonance and
the frequency theory of the body, out of body experiences,
dream travel and CIA funded weirdness, and of course the

(01:31):
topa where this all began. This is a usual journey
through the human mind. It's e spiraling story reage, dive
into the strange, the overlook, and the possibly imagine or
possibly not so. What's in the line? Episode one Minds
without brains, slime modes, mushrooms and plants that learn so

(01:52):
and maybe remember. Episode two Palaces of Memory, Cities of
the mind from ancient readers to Sherlock Holmes, The mental
architecture that turns memory into matchic Episode three Tuned in
by resonance, sound healing and whether your body is more
waveform than meet. Episode four The dreaming Brain, night journeys,

(02:14):
ancestral visitations and the idea that dreams are portals, not
just stressed. Episode five, Eyes closed, body, gun, out of
body experiences, astro projection and what does CIA hope to
find by leaving their minds behind? Episode six The Mind
that made Itself told us and believe born beings. If

(02:36):
you imagine a person long enough, could they become real
and episode seven, reality is malliable? Do you see their
real assets? Or as your brain tells you to spoiler,
it's the second one. So why is this all so
little weird? Sure we'll talk about facts and sciences had
real studies, but we're also here for the goosebumps, the wait,

(02:59):
bad moments, the late night questions like is reality just
a very detailed hallucination we've all agreed on can islame molds?
Or think me? Or am I the topa? We blend science, folklore, philosophy,
and storytelling not to give answers, but to ask better questions.
So if you've ever wondered, can something think without a brain?

(03:22):
Can a dream change your life? Can a thought become
a thing? Then you and my friend are in the
right place. Welcome to Mind beyond Matter, where we don't
just explore the mind, we question where it ends. But
before we float out into parallel realms and reality bending
thought experiments, let's say start where intelligence gets really weird,

(03:44):
like a brainless but brilliant kind of weird. Because episode
one begins into there, literally with creatures that uze, sprout
or stretched across the forest floor, making choices, solving puzzles
and learning, all without a single okay yourd question, But
how you ever felt like a blob of jelly might

(04:06):
be smarter than you? Because today we're talking about something
that doesn't have a brain, doesn't have a mouth, and
still managed to outfit a team of urban engineers. This
is episode one of mine Beyond Matter, Minds without brains,
and our guest today mushrooms, slime modes, and plants. They
don't talk, they don't think, at least not in the

(04:27):
way we do, but they might just know something we don't.
Let's begin with something squeegy, yellow and surprisingly smart meat
vi Areum polycephalum. It's not a pokemon, it's a slime mode,
a gooey, brainous glob that lives in the forests and
technically isn't even an animal or a plant. It's its

(04:47):
own thing. And yet this is cuezy little being can
do something while it solves problems. In twenty ten, researchers
in Japan recreated the layout of the Tokyo railway system
using oats and petri dish. They place oat flakes where
actual cities relocated and let the slime molde roam. What
did you do it? Built a network of tubes to

(05:09):
connect the oats in a way that almost perfectly mimic
talkas actual metro system. No GPS, no blueprint, no urban
planner with a clipboard, just a blob optimizing connections. It
does this using pulses of internal cytoplasmic flow, starturing, retracting,
exploring like a leaving GPS, only better. Just think about

(05:30):
that for a second. A creature with no eyes, no ears,
no neurons, and it still manages to figure out efficient
transport routes. Honestly, the slime mode might have done better
job than some city planners we know all now, if
thought wasn't extrangeal slime modes also remember not in the
wing you or I remember birthdays or embarrassing high school moments.

(05:53):
But they use a kind of chemical trail system as
slime memory, if you will, as similily behind the trail.
If they come across that same thrill again, they avoid it.
Scientists call this externalized special memory, and it's basically the
versional I've been here before. Remove the thrill, though, and
puff it forgets. In another experiment, researchers expose is slime

(06:16):
modes to periodic colde shocks. Eventually, the slime mode started
slowing down in anticipation of the chill before it even happened.
That's not just memory, that's a pattern recognition, or maybe
brainless faresight. And now that we're talking about these brainless
blobs doing smart things, I can help but think as
just why slimes are everywhere in anime and games. Think

(06:37):
about it. Some of the most iconic enemies are characters
or even support characters in fantasy. Reals are literal slimes.
They're often weak, lower level, kind of goofy, but sometimes
they evolve, they absorb things, they become sensioned, powerful shape
shifting bosses, and weirdly enough, that's not too far off

(06:58):
from the realer's time. They don't have a brain, but
they getap optimize and learn patterns, just like slow burn
boss battle that changes the longer you fight it. So
maybe three reason slimes keep showing up in our stories
is because deep down we recognize there's something strangely brilliant
about them. They're not human, they're not even trying to be,

(07:20):
but maybe that's what makes them so unforgettable. Let's lean
from Squeegee into something a bit more bashful. Enter the makhia,
the legendary plant you poke as a kid. As scientific
name is Mimosa pudica, but around the Philippines we call
it makhia from here, meaning shyness. It folds its leaves

(07:40):
when touched, in a botanical version of a bashful poker face. Fact,
it also folds up at night like a stiv plant
pulling its curtains, thanks to a natural rhythm called nick
ti nasty. It's not just shyness, it's the Ricadian choreography.
Now here's where it gets actually weird. In twenty fourteen,
by all to gis Monica Gagliano experimented by gently dropping

(08:03):
knees plants, not once, not twice, but over and over.
At first, mahia tightened up in a reflexive panic, totally justified,
but then it stopped reacting. It had learned, okay, I'm safe.
This is called habituation, a basic form of learning usually
seen in animals, and this isn't amnisia. These plans remember

(08:24):
for up to twenty eight days if that wasn't enough.
In another experiment, researchers trained pea plans to trust being
from a fan, associating it with light eventually the peace
grew toward the fan even when the light was gone.
That's a sociative learning plant level Pablovian response. No brain,
no nerves, just leaves is them and a sided kind

(08:44):
of smarts. Now for a sprinkle. The folklore legend tells
of Maria, a shy girl during the Spanish era, hidden
from invaders by her parents in the bushes. When they
came looking later, all they found was a sensitive plant
that closed the slight touch. And they knew this prahyas
Maria transform so hear in our soil and stories. The

(09:06):
Mariya is more than a curiosity. It's keen to our culture,
our science, and maybe to the way attention and gentleness
can create memory even in a plant. And of course
we can skip the mushrooms. Beneath the forest floor is
a vast network of fungal threats called myceelium. These threats
connect the roots of trees and pants in what scientists

(09:28):
have nicknamed the wood wide web. Through this underground network,
when joy helps, trees exchange nutrients, learn each other about
threats and even reality resources, like a kind of botanical socialism.
Some researchers suggest that the process of electrical activity in
these networks could resemble the primitive form of language. No

(09:49):
one's saying mushrooms are out here writing sonnets, but they
might be talking in a way we've only just began
to understand. Which reason is the big question? What if
intelligence isn't some that lives inside the brain, but something
that emerges across tetworks, roots and edom. So now, what
what does it mean that design mode can a smart
an engineer, or that a plant can learn from experience. Honestly,

(10:14):
it's a little humbling. We've been thought that intelligence is
the sleek, fast, human shape and usually wearing glasses or
even artificial But maybe we've been looking in their wrong places.
These organisms are reminding us, quietly, slowly, stickly, that thinking
doesn't have to look like us. Maybe intelligence doesn't belong
to individuals at all. Maybe it leaves in connections, in rhedoms,

(10:38):
in patterns, in the way is something responds to the world,
whether or not it has a phase, amouth or brain.
And that's the entire spirit of this series. Mine Beyond
Matter is an invitation to consider that mine might be
a field, not a thing, That consciousness might flicker through
unexpected places, not just in heads, but in webs, leaves

(10:59):
is and maybe stories. But if the universe is full
of minds, we simply don't recognize mindset don't speak every language.
Mindsets stretched like threads, are paused through fluid premous line mode,
solving mazes to a plant that choices not to fold.
The world is teeming with forms of intelligence you've only
just begun to notice. And maybe, just maybe the strangest

(11:21):
thing isn't the taken thing. Except we're only now starting
to listen. In the next episode of mind Mean Matter,
we're climbing out of the dirt and into the architecture
of imagination. Ancient thinkers build entire cities inside their minds.
Library use temples, vaults. They call them memory palaces. And
they didn't just imagine them, They used them to story

(11:43):
knowledge the shape thought. So what happens when euroscience with
ancient mental magic? Can imagination shape memory? Can memory shape reality?
Or are we all just living inside someone else's palace?
That's next time. If you brain enjoy these weird, little
filled to me a favor, follow Little Weird on your
favorite podcast apps so you don't miss the excellent. Check

(12:05):
out the show notes for sources links and all the
rabbit tools I fell into well researching this episode. You
can also head to make Coffee Page for extras like
behind the Same notes, digital goodies, and your merch or
if you love reading instead, visit my substock for written
form deep dives. And if you've got a plan that
talks back to you or a mushroom that media question

(12:26):
everything I want to hear about it, tell me on
Instagram at Little Weird Underscore Universe. Until next time, stay
curious and keep your under close. Thanks for listening.