Want to make better decisions? Copy the slime mold

​Being compared to a blob-like, single-celled organism in terms of decision-making prowess might sound unflattering at first, but bear with me.

Slime molds, unassuming blob-like entities that have spent hundreds of millions of years on our planet, defy everything we think we know about intelligence and curiosity.

These single-celled organisms have no neurons, no brain, and no central command, yet they routinely solve problems that stump even our most advanced systems.

And in doing so, they reveal something profound about how tremendous results can emerge from simple rules, broad exploration, and relentless curiosity.

Solving Complex Problems Without a Brain

Slime molds are amoeboid organisms belonging to the kingdom Protista and they inhabit moist environments, feeding on microorganisms found in decaying vegetation. Their world is an unexciting one, which explains why it took is millennia to come to appreciate what we have to learn from their unique adaptations to their environments.

Despite their simple structure, slime molds exhibit behaviors that suggest a form of primitive intelligence, challenging the traditional notion that complex problem-solving requires a brain.​

One of the most compelling demonstrations of slime mold intelligence is their ability to solve mazes.

In a landmark experiment from 2010, Atsushi Tero and colleagues at Hokkaido University explored how the slime mold Physarum polycephalum could be used to model efficient transportation networks. The researchers arranged oat flakes—used as a food source for the slime mold—at points corresponding to cities in the greater Tokyo area on a flat agar plate.

As the slime mold grew, it extended its network of protoplasmic tubes to connect the flakes.

What was astonishing wasn’t that the slime mold would find its way to the flakes, but how the network it developed closely mirrored the actual Tokyo railway system: a system laboriously optimized over decades by engineers and planners equipped with infinitely more complex decision-making systems.

The slime mold’s ability to recreate a major transportation network isn’t magic or an artifact of our hallucinations.

Instead, it’s the result of a simple but powerful decision-making loop honed by evolution.

As the single-cell organism moves, it extends thin veins of protoplasm outward in multiple directions, effectively probing every nook and cranny of its environment.

When these exploratory branches encounter food sources, such as oat flakes in the experiment, they begin to transport nutrients back to the organism’s main body.

This nutrient flow triggers a positive feedback mechanism through signaling molecules so that the more nutrients a particular path provides, the more robust and reinforced that path becomes.

Less rewarding routes aren’t abandoned in order to capitalize on the most rewarding ones.

They’re maintained at a lower intensity, allowing the mold to keep options open and reallocate resources as needed. In effect, the organism builds a living network that balances efficiency with resilience, preserving weak connections that may prove life-saving if conditions change.

The outcome is a decentralized algorithm of surprising sophistication: explore widely, sense locally, and strengthen what works without abandoning what one day might.

Further studies have shown that slime molds can find near-optimal solutions to the Traveling Salesman Problem which poses a truly complex mathematical challenge even for the best supercomputers, requiring calculating the shortest possible route connecting multiple points.

Not bad for a single cell without a brain.

Implications for Human Decision-Making and Embracing Intellectual Curiosity

Although the slime mold doesn’t have a single neuron to its name, it has deep wisdom to share.

That millions of years of evolution have shaped Physarum polycephalum into a master of exploration and adaptability is a point worth exploring more broadly in its own right, particularly for what it can tell us about adaptability and curiosity.

The slime mold doesn’t simply charge toward the largest food source.

It explores broadly, strengthens promising paths, and, crucially, maintains weaker connections to places that might, one day, offer value.

It doesn’t waste energy, but it doesn’t burn bridges, either. It is a system built for survival in an uncertain world, not much different from the one we are entering at breakneck speed.

Just like the slime mold builds a living, breathing map of its environment, we too can shape our lives by exploring widely, reinforcing what works, and keeping the door open to what might.

However, our modern world doesn’t make that easy.

Educational systems and career structures reward early specialization and predictable trajectories. We are encouraged, if not entirely forced, to choose one path, stick to it, and go deep. This approach makes hiring easier and productivity more measurable, but it comes at a cost to both the system and the individuals within it.

When disruption inevitably hits, be it economic collapse, technological displacement, or an AI system that suddenly makes your job obsolete, those who have traveled only one road often find themselves stranded. No map, no exit, no backup plan.

For society at large the loss is also an intellectual, even cultural, one.

A world that dissuades curiosity and sidelines exploration is a world that doesn’t produce the next da Vinci or Leibniz. We all lose when the system snuffs out polymaths before they emerge.

The slime mold, brainless and blind, understands something we seem to forget: flourishing requires range.

Evolution didn’t reward it for picking one winning strategy and sticking with it.

It rewarded it for staying responsive, for moving outward, for trying things that might not pay off today but could save its life tomorrow.

So if you’ve ever felt scattered in your interests or pulled toward too many things to count, maybe that’s not a flaw you have to stamp out.

Maybe it’s a deeply rational, evolutionary strategy for navigating a complex world. One that we would all do well to revive.

The slime mold, in all its humble brilliance, does more than simply remind us of biological ingenuity.

It invites us to embrace our curiosity and explore.