Shufflebrain

There was more. Koshland called attention to another feature of bacterial behavior. He pointed out that in responding to a chemical stimulus--in checking the tumbling action-- "the bacterium has thus reduced a complex problem in three-dimensional migration to a very simple on-off device."[2]

When a human being simplifies a complicated task, we speak about intelligence. Thus bacteria show evidence of rudimentary minds. And we can use hologramic theory to account for it.

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Adler and Tso discovered that attractants induce counterclockwise rotation in E. coli's flagella. Repellents cranked the appendage clockwise. In terms of hologramic theory in its simplest form, the two opposite reactions are 180 degrees (or pi) out of phase. By shifting from random locomotion to movement toward or away from a stimulus, the organism would be shifting from random phase variations in its flagella to harmonic motion--from cacophony to a melody if they were tooting horns instead of churning their appendages.

Adler and Tso identified the bacterium's sensory apparatus. Like the biochemical motor, it also turned out to be a protein. A search eventually turned up strains of E. coli that genetically lack the protein for a specific attractant. (Specific genes direct the synthesis of specific proteins.)

At the time they published their article, Adler and Tso had not isolated the memory protein (if a unique one truly exists). But the absence of that information doesn't prevent our using hologramic theory to explain the observations: Phase spectra must be transformed from the coordinates of the sensory proteins through those of contractile proteins to the flagella and into the wave motion of the propelling cell. Amplitudes can be handled as local constants. The chemical stimulus in principle acts on the bacterium's perceptual mechanism analogous to the reconstruction beam's decoding of an optical hologram. As tensors in a continuum, the phase values encoded in the sensory protein must be transformed to the coordinate system representing locomotion. The same message passes from sensory to motor mechanisms, and through whatever associates the two. Recall that tensors define the coordinates, not the other way around. Thus, in terms of information, the locomotion of the organism is a transformation of the reaction between the sensory protein and the chemical stimulus, plus or minus the effects of local constants. Absolute amplitudes and noise, products of local constants, would come from such things as the viscosity of the fluid (e.g., thick pus versus sweat) the age and health of organisms, the nutritional quality of the medium (better to grow on the unwashed hands of a fast-food hamburger flipper than on the just-scrubbed fingernails of a surgical nurse), or whatever else the phase spectrum cannot encode. As for the storage of whole codes in small physical spaces, remember that phase has no prescribed size in the absolute sense. A single molecule can contain a whole message.

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Evidence of memory on single-celled animals dates back at least to 1911, to experiments of the protozoologists L. M. Day and M. Bentley on paramecia.[3] Day and Bentley put a paramecium into a snug capillary tube--one whose diameter less than the animal's length. The paramecium swam down to the opposite end of the tube, where it attempted to turn abound. But in the cramped lumen, the little fellow twisted, curled, ducked, bobbed....but somehow managed by accident to get faced in the opposite direction. What did it do? It immediately swam to the other end and got itself stuck again. And again it twisted, curled, ducked...and only managing to get turned around by pure luck. Then, after a while Day and Bentley began to notice something. The animal was taking less and less time to complete the course. It was becoming more and more efficient at the tricky turn-around maneuver. Eventually, it learned to execute the move on the first attempt.

Day and Bentley's observations didn't fit the conventional wisdom of their day, nor the criteria for learning among some schools of thought in our own times. Their little paramecia had taught themselves the trick, which in some circles doesn't count as learning. But in the 1950s an animal behaviorist named Beatrice Gelber conditioned paramecia by the same basic approach Pavlov had taken when he used a whiff of meat to make a dog drool when it heard the ringing of a bell.