---
schema: 1
type: question
id: 7
title: How do aneural biological systems process information and learn?
description: How plants, slime moulds and single cells sense, decide, remember and communicate without a brain.
created: 2026-08-29
updated: 2026-09-27
attributes:
  isPublic: true
  inquiry: answered
  confidence: 0.94
  pillar: natural-computing
---

## Question

Plant Intelligence, Basal Cognition, and Molecular Computation: How Do Aneural Biological Systems Process Information and Learn? How do organisms lacking a centralized nervous system (plants, slime molds, unicellular networks) perceive environmental stimuli, compute adaptive decisions, store long-term memories, and communicate across scale-free biological architectures?

## Why it matters

They are working designs for decentralised, low-power computation that AI architectures could borrow.

The full research is in the research notes.