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Basal Cognition

In SPLectrum, cognition is the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through experience — the process associated with P2, language as the medium through which a subject experiences reality. The definition is deliberately widened: “mental” is dropped, cutting the route that runs mental → brain → mind and quietly pre-locates the process; and experience is taken the SPLectrum way — the subject’s interaction with reality through its language medium, whatever the subject and whatever the medium. Nothing in the definition mentions a brain.

This resonates strongly with the new research field of basal cognition — the study of cognition below the nervous system, framed by Lyon and carried furthest experimentally by Levin. The field’s working definition — the capacities by which organisms become familiar with, value, and exploit their environment while avoiding harm — fits within SPLectrum’s, and the field’s existence highlights the need for the generalisation: the capacities it documents are real, and they run in organisms, and parts of organisms, that have no neurons at all. SPLectrum’s interest is to work the cases below out as language games, and through them to follow the continuity of the cognition process from the non-neural into the neural.

Research examples of resonance

Basal cognition is an active field with ongoing research; the examples below are a reading of results as they stand, not a settled canon. What resonates in them is meaning being worked with and created in organisms, and parts of organisms, without neurons.

The bacterium’s comparison. E. coli swims up a food gradient by holding the attractant level of a few seconds ago against the level arriving now: methylation states on its chemoreceptors are the record, and the difference sets the next move — run on, or tumble and try a new direction. The cell does not measure the world in absolutes; it works with more than a moment ago, a relational term its own chemistry constitutes. A gradient is something that exists only for a swimmer with a recent past. And the reach of the cell’s world is set by its receptor repertoire: what it has no receptor for does not exist for it.

The ciliate’s repertoire. Stentor roeselii, a single cell, meets a persisting irritant with responses in order: bend away, reverse the cilia, contract, and finally detach and leave. Each response tried and failed changes what the irritant means for the next move — meaning revised as the interaction runs, with no neurons anywhere.

The mould’s map. Physarum polycephalum’s tube network — the organism that famously re-drew the Tokyo rail map across a bed of oat flakes — is acquired structure that is also the body: the map it built of its world is its retention, and it changes what the organism can subsequently do.

The bacterial conversation. Quorum sensing is meaning between beings at the same scale. Bacteria synthesise, release, and detect signal molecules; above a threshold concentration — above a population density — reception flips gene expression across the whole population at once. The signals are mostly species-specific — molecular dialects — but one molecule, AI-2, is produced and read across a wide span of species, and the microbiology literature itself calls it a common language of bacterial interaction. The meaning of a signal is fixed on the reception side: different species read the same molecule through different receptors, to different effect. Some bacteria run several signal circuits in parallel and integrate them, distinguishing how many of us from how many of them. What the coordination often builds is a biofilm — the conversation’s sediment, in shared physical form.

The pattern held in voltage. Levin’s programme shows ordinary, non-neural tissue holding instructive patterns in a shared electrical medium. A voltage prepattern on the Xenopus embryo’s surface marks the future face before any facial structure exists. A brief bioelectric perturbation leaves flatworms that regenerate two heads — and regenerate two heads again when re-cut, the altered target held somewhere other than the genome, which is unchanged. Cells interacting through a medium, holding among themselves a pattern that shapes what they collectively build.