Bacteria Use Brainlike Bursts of Electricity to Communicate | Hacker News Reader

Bacteria Use Brainlike Bursts of Electricity to Communicate

quantamagazine.org

42 pointsnature248 comments

Not just that bacteria can use electricity for communication, but DNA also has the computing power of a neural network. Imagine every cell with the intelligence of a neural net of many thousands of neurons (= to the number number of genes).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_regulatory_network

> In single-celled organisms, regulatory networks respond to the external environment, optimising the cell at a given time for survival in this environment.

> Genes can be viewed as nodes in the network, with input being proteins such as transcription factors, and outputs being the level of gene expression. The value of the node depends of a function which depends in the value of its regulators in previous time steps (in the Boolean network described below these are Boolean functions, typically AND, OR, and NOT). These functions have been interpreted as performing a kind of information processing within the cell, which determines cellular behavior. The basic drivers within cells are concentrations of some proteins, which determine both spatial (location within the cell or tissue) and temporal (cell cycle or developmental stage) coordinates of the cell, as a kind of "cellular memory".

This is intriguing to hear of the "computing power" of genes - especially the metaphors of the circuit/computer/program like boolean functions, information processing, memory, storage.

I read once about how scientific fields like biology and psychology were influenced by the industrial revolution, to view the world and ourselves using metaphors of the machine - e.g., the steam engine - to "let off steam", etc. These days, we are using metaphors of the computer, hard/software, networks, to model/describe/understand the mechanisms operating in nature.

It makes me wonder about how there are so many similarities of form and function across layers of the physical world, in the quantum scale, microscopic, human/social levels and beyond. How these bacteria "glom together", form communicating communities, and how they use "quorum sensing" (secrete chemicals to reach a critical level and trigger mass change). It's fascinating to consider how we humans behave very similarly to colonies of (somewhat) intelligent bacteria..

Since you point it out, the computational analogy of the brain is useful but also has shortcomings as it leads us to misconceptions.

There's also a model/theory called enacting which doesn't consider cognition like a computer but rather like a piano.

Thank you for the pointer on enacting and a curious metaphor of cognition as a piano, that made me dig deeper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism

This reminds me of the issue of the comic book, titled Mr. Majestic, written by Alan Moore, in which the universe suffers heat death and among the last few remaining survivors alive to witness it, is a hyper-intelligent strain of syphilis, which is able to communicate telepathically with its hosts.

Likewise, it makes me think of the Descolada virus from the Ender's Game sequels.

Lynn Margulis has proposed that our neurons have bacterial origins[1], this would certainly appear to support that hypothesis.

1: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001....

"The Conscious Cell" - intuitively I could see how the hypothesis makes sense; this was a deeply interesting paper, and led me to Margulis' book _Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species_. Appreciate the link!

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