The Blob, a Brainless Intelligence? Fiction or Reality: Audrey Dussutour at TEDxToulouse

Audrey Dussutour, researcher at the CNRS in Toulouse, France, presents her work on myxomycetes, the slime molds more commonly called blobs. Are blobs simple happily colored mushrooms or dangerous and intelligent aliens, ready to devour anything that comes in their way?

Hi everyone!

Today, I'm going to talk to you
about a living organism

that I'm working on
in my research laboratory at CNRS,

that we affectionally call the blob.

So here's what the blob looks like.

Surely you've already seen some.

You didn't know that
this was called a blob in the wilderness

and that it often lives in the undergrowth.

So these are big yellow masses

in the trees.

A blob can take on any color.

It can be pink, red, blue,

oftentimes yellow, and also, white.

But the blob's most distinctive feature,
is that it's huge. How big?

Well, a blob is big,
it can be up to 10 square meters,

although we haven't really managed
to grow them any bigger, but they could.

So let's imagine that I am 2 m².

In my body, there are approximately
100 billion cells.

They are all 10 micrometers wide.

Here, you see a blob. Do you know
how many cells? It's a single cell.

So you see, it's a single 10m² cell.

Actually, if you compare one
of my little cells to the blob's cell --

that would be like comparing
my fist to the Earth.

So that's the order of magnitude.

And what's even scarier with the blob,
is that it moves.

So of course, when I said
that you'd seen it before,

you'd have to get out of the city,
into the woods.

but obviously, this is an accelerated video.

You've never seen it cross a road.

In fact, a blob moves at a rate
of about one centimeter an hour.

Four centimeters an hour,
if it's really hungry.

Remember that what you're seeing here
is just a single cell.

Because it's a single cell,
this one cell serves all functions:

the function of the eye, the nose,
the ear, the stomach, the lungs, etc.

But I still haven't told you what a blob is.

Imagine that in Texas someone asked

that very same question
when she found it in her garden.

In Texas a lady found a huge
yellow mass in her garden

and asked, "But what is it?"
She immediately thought it was an alien.

So she called the fire brigade
who set fire to the blob,

she called the police, who shot it,
and the next day, imagine her surprise

when she saw it was twice as big.

So that's how – you know about
Unidentified Flying Objects, UFO's –

and this is how the UCO came into being,
the Unidentified Crawling Object.

This kind of stories obviously feeds

the imagination of film-makers
and I don't know if you've heard

about the movie "The Blob"
with Steve McQueen.

Let me show you a clip.

Dave, Doc Hallen's been killed!
Doc Hallen? What happened?

I don't know what it is,
but you've gotta come now!

Well wait a minute Steve, tell us what's happened.
Well I'm trying to tell you! This thing has killed the Doc!

But what was it? Out with it, kid!

Well it's kinda like a ... kinda like a mass
that keeps getting bigger and bigger!

[Beware of]

["The BLOB!"]

Everyone of you watching this screen,
look out, because soon, very soon,

the most horrifying monster menace
ever conceived

will be oozing into this theater!

[Run – don't walk!]

[From "The BLOB!"]

[It crawls!]

[It creeps!]

[It eats you alive!]

Starring Steve McQueen
and a cast of exciting young people!

[Get set... it's coming soon!]

["The Blob"]

Now, let me reassure you,

the Blob isn't going to eat you today.

In fact, we call the blob by a scientific name
whcih is much less appealing:

slime mold, or myxomycete - which comes
from the Greek for sticky mushroom.

But let me stop you right there.

The blob is not a mushroom.
The blob is not a plant,

the blob is not an animal. In fact,
it has the properties of all three at once.

A little bit animal, a litle bit plant,
and a little bit mushroom.

We couldn't really classify it.

Therefore, we put it in a family
where they put the hodgepodge of biology,

when nobody knows what it is,
we put it in a family called protists.

So the blob has been put in with the protists.

There are a thousand different species of blob.

Looking at ourselves, at our own species,
Homo sapiens sapiens,

there's only one.
There's only one species of mankind.

All the others have disappeared.

With the blobs there are
a thousand species of different blobs.

You see, that's why they differ
in color, shape, etc.

In fact, with the blob, like the butterfly,
there's a Jekyll and Hyde effect.

You have a caterpillar, often not very pretty,

which often results in an extremely pretty butterfly.
It's a bit like that with the blob.

You see a not-very-appetizing mass -

it isn't very pretty to see, a blob.

However, during its reproductive period
it shows these magnificent iridescent spores

that people collect.

Reproduction, everybody has heard
of reproduction.

We're all adults, so that happens
between a male and a female.

That is, in the simplest of cases.

With plants, animals, mushrooms,
there's always a male and a female.

Of course, there are hermaphroditic animals,
we won't go into this kind of detail,

but it remains, male and female.

Blobs have 221 different sexes.

You don't have a male and a female,

so that, when you enter a room,
you could say

you have 50% chance of reproducing.

When the blob comes into a room,
it has a 99.5% chance of finding

someone of the opposite sex.

Not bad at all!

In fact, you could say that

the blob is kind of the teen myxomycete.

That is, before getting to reproduction,
making spores,

what does it have to do, like a teen?

It has to eat, to fatten up so as to

produce the maximum amount of spores.

You'll tell me: since it doesn't eat humans,
what does it eat, this blob?

Well, it eats mushrooms.
And again I can reassure you,

this is accelerated,
it doesn't eat mushrooms in a single minute.

It will take the blob roughly an hour
to eat a mushroom.

You see it covering the mushrooms
and completely engulf them.

Nothing remains of the mushroom
after the blob has passed.

In fact, it absorbs the mushrooms
into the interior of its body where, they are digested.

Here you see the little mushroom
disappearing very quickly -

it's a bit scary.

Of course, in our lab we don't have
the luxury of being able to have --

and grow -- a lot of mushrooms.

So, what we're giving our blob --
and someone from Japan

discovered this in the sixties --

the blob loves oatmeal.
You should know that a blob around this size

eats about a kilo of oatmeal a week.

That's still quite substantial,
we spend a fortune on oatmeal,

but still, we spend less
than if we were producing mushrooms.

Second question: since it's a living organism,

you'd expect that the blob -- like any other animal,

plant, or mushroom --
would die, at a certain point.

The blob is immortal!
In fact, there are two things the blob doesn't like:

it doesn't like light
and it doesn't like being hungry.

So when it finds itself in those situations
that are dangerous for it, what does it do?

It dries out. It forms a completely dry structure
that we call a sclerotium.

And that sclerotium can stay like that for years.

So if one day, you're fed up
with feeding your laboratory blob,

because you'd like to go on holiday,
you just leave it to dry.

You put it in a cupboard,
come back two weeks later,

splash some water on it
and off it goes again.

What's fascinating with the blob,
is that you can cut it into pieces,

into tiny pieces.

In fact it holds a record --
suppose you were to cut

any organ at all in two,

you would bleed, and it'll take a long time to heal.

The blob has a healing time of two minutes!

That is, if you cut a piece off the blob, set it aside,

in two minutes, it's as if nothing ever happened.

Once you cut the blob up,

and put the pieces side by side, what will they do?

They will form a new blob.

So it's important that you know,
when growing blob in a lab, when it grows,

when you see it, say, in the evening
and then again the next morning,

it's doubled in size.
It grows exponentially.

Every day, you'll double
the amount of blob in your lab.

So of course the next question,

now that we know it's immortal, has 221 sexes, etc.
is -- but is it intelligent, this blob?

Is it worthy of real study?

So first of all -- what is intelligence?

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.

So, we're going to give the blob
some problems, and

see if it has any solutions
to these problems.

The first problem we gave the blob,
was with a Japanese team.

It's a labyrinth problem.

What we did was,

we put lots of pieces of blob in the labyrinth

and the blob had to get out of the labyrinth.

You can see here

that all the little blobs have fused together,

covering the labyrinth,
and you see very quickly, in fact,

in the experiment, that it succeeds
in finding the way out of the labyrinth.

Next, we gave it a more human problem.

We made a couple of miniature maps of Japan.
This is a map of Japan.

And what you can see here, is that we have put
a little blob in Tokyo.

And all these little points here,
are in fact little oatmeal flakes,

that represent the cities around Tokyo.

So we asked the blob to join
all of these little food sources,

so it could eat in the most efficient way.

We looked at the network
that it formed at the end.

I've got a little movie here -- you'll see.

The blob grows, like it always does
when you put it somewhere,

the first thing it does, it tries to escape.

So you see here
that it connects the oatmeal flakes,

and once it's in contact with an oatmeal flake,

it sends out a vein in order to circulate
the nutrients in the organism.

So it's going to connect all the little flakes.
Next, we analyze

the network of veins formed by the blob,
and we compare it to the railway network

made by the Japanese.
It took 50 years to make this railway network.

And we compare
if the network made by the blob

is more effective
than the man-made railway network.

Well, figure this, it is much more effective

this network produced by the blob in 24 hours!

How to measure network effectiveness?
Simple, for example,

for this city, what is the shortest route?
Alternatively, when I cut

a link, can I make a detour?

That is how we measure a network.
We looked at

the effectiveness of the network
produced by the blob.

It was much more effective
than the railway network built by the Japanese.

Another question arose in our laboratories.

Working on nutrition, we say,
"Ok, the blob is smart, it can make networks,

but does it know how to eat properly?"

We know very well that humans, when faced –
when we go to the supermarket, we take a little

food, a bit of protein, a little sugar
and normally

we should take a diet which is optimal
for our survival and our health.

However, often, we don't succeed very well.
It can be seen in many animals

we tend to find these tendencies for,
for example, obesity a lot.

Therefore we wondered
if the blob was able,

if we proposed a lot of diets
that would appeal to its taste,

would it be able to choose the best

for its survival and its health?

So here you see food pellets
that are characterized by a certain proportion

of sugar and protein.

And one of these tablets is good
for the blobs health and survival.

When we deposit a blob in the middle
of this device, we saw that

in 100% of the cases,
it chose the correctly adjusted diet.

It is never wrong.

Often when we talk about intelligence,
we want to go a little further.

Memory is often mentioned,
because intelligence is also the ability to learn.

Good the blob, it has a small problem.
It doesn't have a brain.

Often for memory, there must be a brain.

The solution it found,
it is to have not internal but external memory.

You see, whenever the blob moves,
it leaves behind this trail of mucus.

In fact, it is like the ghost of the blob
one hour before.

The blob was here, it found nothing,
it has repatriated all of its equipment,

and then it went exploring
the other side of the box.

This mucus that it leaves behind,
it's like a memory.

So the blob knows it's already been here
and there's nothing there. It won't go over the mucus again.

That's quite an extraordinary technique,
because imagine you don't have eyes,

like the blob, no ears,
you have nothing and you're plunged

in a dark room, and you have to find,
for example, a red ball.

Imagine how many times you return to the same spot,
when you're plunged into darkness.

The blob doesn't have this problem.
It leaves mucus behind,

it will never go to the same place twice,

it'll find the ball faster than you, surely.

And so –

We posed it a problem
that is often encountered in robotics,

that's the U-shaped trap.
So, imagine yourself

in this situation, you are in a dark room
and there is a white light in front of you,

and you have to reach the light.
But you are immersed in the dark,

and in front of you, there is an obstacle,
a wall that you can not see.

So, the first thing you'll do is go right,
and in fact, fall in the trap

here, and you will need to get around the wall
to get out and go toward the light.

It is not very easy to implement, for example.

So we asked the blob to do the same task.

So here you have its wall and here

there's no light, as it has no eyes.
It had to find something else.

So we have tried to lure it by a droplet of sugar
because it loves sugar a lot.

So here's what happened.
Here you see that

it moves pretty quickly, it explores its environment,
it falls into the trap.

But you will see
that it'll get out of the trap very fast

and actually join the droplet of sugar water.

So we thought that it was really this memory
of the environment that it used.

To test it, we did the same experiment,
but this time,

as you see here, we fully covered

the ground on which it moves with mucus,
to make it believe that it

already explored the entire environment.
So in fact it was

confused at the level of its memory,
because it thought it had explored everywhere.

So here is what is happening.
Already you see it's growing

much slower. It does not understand,
then goes a bit in all directions.

It's not really going towards the sugar,
it falls into the trap,

and you'll see here in fact
that it will stay stuck

in this trap.
So it is the use of this mucus

that makes that the blob can get out of the trap
and has a memory of its environment.

The last thing to know about the blobs,
which is quite extraordinary,

is – it always has this single cell,
it's brainless;

well, this single brainless cell
also has a personality.

I was searching for blobs in Australia,

the United States, and Japan
and I've compared them.

They are of the same species,
it is the same animal,

but it is not an animal, the same protist.

And we compared how they evolved
in given surroundings.

You see, it's a box, we look at
how they explore their environment.

So here you have the Australian,
American and Japanese.

See that the Japanese is already off
to explore its environment,

the Australian doesn't do a lot
and the American forms these little fingers.

It explores its environment.
This one is very, very quick to explore its environment

while the Australian is very slow,
takes its time, and the American

has a new strategy,
which is to send arms everywhere.

And so we said, it's funny because,
finally, the Japanese is a lot

more effective, because it explores
its environment very quickly.

But suddenly, they were given tasks.

For example,
they had two options to choose from.

Option 1 is a good option,
option 2 is a bad option.

For example it can be a source of food
that is good

and a source of food that is bad.

The Japanese really wasn't good
at these kind of tasks

because it went at top speed,
so half the time, it was mistaken.

The Australian, who took its time
to explore its environment, was never wrong

and was always going for the best option.

The experiment that you'd want to do,
obviously, is to mingle the blobs

and put them together.
What would an American do with an Australian,

or a Japanese?
Of course, that's what we did.

But first we put them with each other,
two Americans together,

two Australians together,
two Japanese together.

and they were given a food source.
And we looked at what they were doing.

So the blob has two options.
Either it will go see its friend

or it goes to the food.
What we saw with the American

is that one went to the food very fast

and the other which avoided it completely,

which didn't want to touch the other blob at all.

The Australian has a very cuddly side, which is:

"Ah, me, I'm going to see my friend first
and then together we will go to the food."

So the first thing two Australians do
when they are together,

It is to merge, to form a single blob.

The Japanese, it is,
"We go to the food first, but we share."

Therefore, it is quite sharing.
The American, no sharing at all.

So of course we did mixed experiments.

You should know that the Australian,
when you put it with a Japanese or an American,

It is still as cuddly.

He runs them after trying to form a blob.
Others shun him.

If you put an American with a Japanese,
the American kills the Japanese.

In fact, the American, merges with the Japanese
and kills it and it takes everything that's there

in its cell, all nutrients, etc.,
and it leaves

behind him a completely soft blob.
As if it's not completely immortal.

So, lastly, regarding their personality,
a little lab anecdote.

Often, the laboratory bought the oatmeal
at the supermarket.

Once, I said to myself,
"Hey, there's organic oatmeal,

it might be nicer for the growth of the blob."

So I bought big buckets of organic oatmeal.

And I feed my three blobs with organic oats.

The Australian feasts, the Japanese feasts,
the American didn't eat any organic!

It will only eat the oatmeal purchased

at the supermarket.

So, you are going to ask, is it ever going
to invade the world, this blob

that's so smart? Well, I will reply
that it already has, for 500 million years.

Thank you for your attention.

(Applause)