FR 0002
Good morning.
I woke up thinking about foreign forms of intelligence today. Everyone is talking about the divorce of intelligence from biological substrate, and what they mean by that is “human-like intelligence”. There's nothing saying animal intelligence isn't totally from ours. In fact, there's a lot saying it is different from ours.
If you look at things like murmuration (thousands of starlings flying together in highly synchronized, swooping, perfect shape-shifting formations, without ever hitting each other, all moving as one mass), the strange symbiotic living situation of coral reefs, or how all the birds in the forest go quiet and flee long before humans ever realize there’s a disaster coming, or the way complex ecosystems use animal behaviors to heal — be it beavers in reforesting efforts, or the way nature uses fire as a necessary part of growth — it’s pretty clear there are modes of cognition and biological organizational patterns that have nothing in common with humans, but are extremely clever.
That’s before I get to the really crazy study I learned about this week titled "An Experiment on Precognition with Planarian Worms”.
It’s so out there that I’m just going to copy and paste the abstract directly:
“The ability to predict a random noxious stimulus (a startle sound) was explored in the black planarian Girardia dorotocephala. During the experiment, planarians were put individually and only once in a testing chamber and after 3 minutes either an audio startle stimuli or a control moment of silence was randomly presented (corresponding respectively to the 43 experimental and the 37 control subjects, all of them having the same time courses of observation).
All worms were filmed during the experiment, and the frequency of their Head Movements (this behavior being indicative of distress and/or ambient exploration) was registered in the two 10-second segments immediately before and one minute before stimulus presentation for the experimental subjects and immediately before and one minute before the time point 3 minutes from start for the controls, which received no stimulus.
Nonparametric comparisons of the frequencies of Head Movements showed that the values obtained during the two observation periods for the experimental planarians were significantly higher than those during the corresponding observation periods for the control planarians.
Additionally, in both the experimental and control subjects no significant difference was observed between the values for the two observation periods within the same session. These results suggest that planarians are able to anticipate future events at least one minute before they occur.”
Stay with me here. Basically, planarian worms can maybe react to stimuli up to 60 seconds before it happens?
It’s a small study with a lot of places for someone to argue with, but the core idea is fun to think about. The introduction continues to makes some really out there statements, which makes the paper even more fun to read.
It starts this way (mostly, I removed long citations and put them at the bottom instead):
“The ability to perceive an event prior to its occurrence without any apparent clues has been demonstrated in humans by observational (Vassy 1978) and experimental studies dealing with changes in physiological variables such as heart rate, fingertip blood volume, electroencephalogram changes, magnetic resonance imaging, electrodermal activity, and pupil dilation preceding the random presentation of emotional pictures(1) or audio startle stimuli(2).
The use of human physiology to actually predict the occurrence of future random events has been supported by a meta-analysis carried out by Mossbridge, Tressoldi, and Utts (2012). Since the phenomenon is based on unconscious physiological activity, the term Predictive Anticipatory Activity (PAA) is defined by Mossbridge, Tressoldi, Utts, Ives, Radin, and Jonas (2014) as “statistically reliable differences between physiological measures recorded seconds before an unpredictable emotional event occurs vs. seconds before an unpredictable neutral event occurs,” while the term precognition would apply more to a perception or a behavior (not a physiological measure).
Although research on non-humans would no doubt widen the opportunity for understanding the biological mechanisms involved in anomalous anticipatory activity, very few studies have been undertaken with them on this topic.
The results obtained with birds (Alvarez 2010a,b) and mammals (3) prove that the phenomenon also occurs in animals endowed with a highly developed nervous system. On the other hand, the nearly significant result obtained in an experiment performed with earthworms (Wildey 2001) suggests that it may also occur in animals endowed with a less complex nervous system.”
Sure, fuck it, maybe worms can see the future. Maybe much more advanced creatures can too. Maybe advanced isn’t even the right way to think about the animal, considering that humans probably can’t react to stimuli up to 60 seconds before it happens.
The paper admits this is weird, fully in crank territory, but follows it all up with this: “these results are in accord with most studies dealing with prediction of random future events (and made more clear in Mossbridge, Tressoldi, & Utts’ 2012 meta-analysis) in that the effect is small but highly statistically significant, the mechanism remaining unclear”.
It’s so brave to admit that they don’t know, that they have no real explanation, but damnit, there’s something here, and the meta-analysis suggests they’re less crazy than they sound. I think this is wonderful. There is so much we don’t know! There are so many mechanisms we do not understand in the human body, let alone in the world around us. There is so much we still can learn, so much left for us to discover!
It doesn’t really matter to me if this paper is object-level correct. It doesn’t even really matter to me if it’s not a rigorous study, or if it was something that doesn’t replicate. Nothing except GLP-1 trials seem to replicate, anyway.
I’m not taking it as truth. I’m reading this paper with pure delight in human creativity. This is radically out of the box, a very different way of thinking. Truly out of distribution. The world needs more mad scientists, more cranks, more people doing something no one believes can be done. Everything is impossible until it is done.
I can’t help but wonder if the parallel to humans is there — are we like the lowly worm, reacting to stimuli before it happens? Are we bracing for a future impact we haven’t yet felt? Can non-organic intelligence see it too, or is this a uniquely organic experience?
Footnotes:
- Radin 1997a,b, 2004, Bierman & Radin 1997, 1999, Bierman & Scholte 2002, McCraty, Atkinson, & Bradley 2004a,b, Sartori, Massaccesi, Martinelli, & Tressoldi 2004, Tressoldi, Martinelli, Massaccesi, & Sartori 2005
- Spottiswoode & May 2003, May, Paulinyi, & Vassy 2005, Tressoldi, Martinelli, & Semenzato 2011, 2013
- Duval & Montredon 1968, Sheldrake & Smart 1998, 2000, Radin 2002)