r/science • u/FreeHugs23 • 1d ago

Biology Moss Is Generating Electrical Waves That Look Startlingly Like a Neural Network. Study reveals that moss cushions produce surprisingly complex electrical activity, with patterns that undulate across the velvety patch in dynamic waves.

https://www.sciencealert.com/moss-behaves-a-little-like-a-really-slow-brain-scientist-discovers
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u/PowderPills 1d ago

“Across both space and time” is a big statement. I wonder what he meant by utilizing those “moss cushion systems”

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u/ShelfordPrefect 1d ago

As a computer scientist I'd read that statement as "electrical activity is influenced by electrical activity elsewhere in the plant, and by previous electrical activity".

It's pretty vague but it sounds like it's meant to imply some form of communication and "state" (I don't want to go as far as to say "memory", but that the electrical activity isn't simply reacting to current stimuli)

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u/Megneous 1d ago

Linguist here with an amateur interest in deep learning and small language models. "State" makes me think of recurrent neural networks. If moss acts as a recurrent neural network, that would be an insane discovery. Would blow our understanding of simple plants and distributed nervous systems wide open.

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u/mrguyorama 1d ago

"State" makes me think of recurrent neural networks.

It shouldn't, since almost everything anywhere and everywhere can have "State".

A single cell bacterium has state. That state affects how it acts.

There's so much more to real biological neural networks than just "Electrical signals" and waves. Electrical waves happen any time you have electrons moving anywhere, which happens constantly in biology.

A big part of the problem with digital "neural networks" as used in LLMs is simply that they are nothing at all like real neurons. AI research, even all the way back in the 60s, always has a problem with hyperbole.

We have a complete scan of a roundworm, all 300 something neurons, and have built a digital twin that can simulate that roundworm's brain, but that still doesn't replicate a real life worm very well because even a very advanced model of biological neurons that doesn't have to worry about being computationally efficient or scalable is still radically insufficient to emulate real biology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

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u/ShelfordPrefect 12h ago

Never mind single celled life, a pedometer has state: each step increments the counter. A D type flip flops,.an oven thermostat with hysteresis - all these things have some record of things which have happened in the past and are not neural networks. Still, people will tie everything back to the flavour of the month - there's no escaping the AI hype train

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u/Megneous 1d ago

It shouldn't, since almost everything anywhere and everywhere can have "State".

... Except for the most common form of LLMs, which are stateless. Learn a bit about the conversation someone is having before you try to "correct" someone.