The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. A unique material, nickel oxide demonstrates the ability to learn things about its environment in a way that emulates the most basic learning abilities of animals, as my colleagues and I describe in a new paper. For over half a century, neuroscientists have studied sea slugs to understand basic animal learning. Two fundamental concepts of learning are habituation and sensitization. Habituation occurs when an organism's response to a repeated stimulus continuously decreases.

Within the scientific research community, memory information in the brain is commonly believed to be stored in the synapse - a hypothesis famously attributed to psychologist Donald Hebb. However, there is a growing minority who postulate that memory is stored inside the neuron at the molecular (RNA or DNA) level - an alternative postulation known as the cell-intrinsic hypothesis, coined by psychologist Randy Gallistel. In this paper, we review a selection of key experimental evidence from both sides of the argument. We begin with Eric Kandel's studies on sea slugs, which provided the first evidence in support of the synaptic hypothesis. Next, we touch on experiments in mice by John O'Keefe (declarative memory and the hippocampus) and Joseph LeDoux (procedural fear memory and the amygdala). Then, we introduce the synapse as the basic building block of today's artificial intelligence neural networks. After that, we describe David Glanzman's study on dissociating memory storage and synaptic change in sea slugs, and Susumu Tonegawa's experiment on reactivating retrograde amnesia in mice using laser. From there, we highlight Germund Hesslow's experiment on conditioned pauses in ferrets, and Beatrice Gelber's experiment on conditioning in single-celled organisms without synapses (Paramecium aurelia). This is followed by a description of David Glanzman's experiment on transplanting memory between sea slugs using RNA. Finally, we provide an overview of Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler's experiment on DNA transfer of fear in mice from parents to offspring. We conclude with some potential implications for the wider field of psychology.

A new study has found that a material can mimic the sea slug's most essential intelligence features. The discovery is a step toward building hardware that could help make AI more efficient and reliable for technology ranging from self-driving cars and surgical robots to social media algorithms. The study, publishing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by a team of researchers from Purdue University, Rutgers University, the University of Georgia and Argonne National Laboratory. "Through studying sea slugs, neuroscientists discovered the hallmarks of intelligence that are fundamental to any organism's survival," said Shriram Ramanathan, a Purdue professor of materials engineering. "We want to take advantage of that mature intelligence in animals to accelerate the development of AI." Two main signs of intelligence that neuroscientists have learned from sea slugs are habituation and sensitization.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. For artificial intelligence to get any smarter, it needs first to be as intelligent as one of the simplest creatures in the animal kingdom: the sea slug. Researchers have found that a material can mimic the sea slug's most essential intelligence features. The discovery is a step toward building hardware that could help make AI more efficient and reliable for technology ranging from self-driving cars and surgical robots to social media algorithms. "Through studying sea slugs, neuroscientists discovered the hallmarks of intelligence that are fundamental to any organism's survival," says Shriram Ramanathan, a professor of materials engineering at Purdue University.

Researchers mimic the animal kingdom's most basic signs of intelligence in quantum material WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- For artificial intelligence to get any smarter, it needs first to be as intelligent as one of the simplest creatures in the animal kingdom: the sea slug. A new study has found that a material can mimic the sea slug's most essential intelligence features. The discovery is a step toward building hardware that could help make AI more efficient and reliable for technology ranging from self-driving cars and surgical robots to social media algorithms. The study, publishing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by a team of researchers from Purdue University, Rutgers University, the University of Georgia and Argonne National Laboratory. "Through studying sea slugs, neuroscientists discovered the hallmarks of intelligence that are fundamental to any organism's survival," said Shriram Ramanathan, a Purdue professor of materials engineering.

It is a nightmarish science fiction scenario, in which two people's memories can be swapped between their brains. But fiction has become reality, after neuroscientists were able to transfer a memory from one animal into another. The memory was the recollection of being given a mild electric shock, in sea slugs zapped repeatedly for two days. When material from their brains was transferred into sea slugs which had never been shocked in their lives, they reacted exactly the same way to the weak touch of a wire. The results suggest that memories can be physically transferred by injection, and follow claims from similar experiments in the 1960s that this could lead to'memory pills' or jabs in the future.

Researchers have developed a'cyberslug' that behaves similarly to the real sea creatures. The artificially intelligent predator is capable of acting like a physical organism, the Pleurobranchaea californica sea slug, which the creature was modeled from. The'cyberslug' can react to food the way the original organism would - and, the experts say it's even self-aware. Additionally, it responds to other slugs much like a real, non-artificial sea slug would. University of Illinois Professor Rhanor Gillette explained that the cyberslug is different than other artificial entities and has a self-awareness that is simple.

When Leonid Moroz, a gregarious Russian-born neuroscientist and geneticist at the University of Florida, began studying ctenophores nearly a decade ago, he had a fairly simple goal in mind. He wanted to determine exactly where the blobby marine creatures--which are more commonly known as comb jellies because of the comb-like projections they use to swim--belonged on the tree of life. After spending several years sequencing ctenophores, Moroz and his team discovered that the animals were missing many of the genes found in the nervous system of other animals thought to be closely related, such as coral and actual jellyfish. That meant that they'd branched off on their own up to 550 million years ago and were potentially among the first animals on earth. "It was quite surprising to see," said Moroz, almost like stumbling on a group of aliens living in the sea.

Another option is to use more robust cells as actuators. Here at Case Western Reserve University, we've recently begun to investigate this possibility by turning to the hardy marine sea slug Aplysia californica. Since A. californica lives in the intertidal region, it can experience big changes in temperature and environmental salinity over the course of a day. When the tide goes out, the sea slugs can get trapped in tide pools. As the sun beats down, water can evaporate and the temperature will rise.

Last month, scientists unveiled a tiny robot that swims using rat heart cells. Now, researchers from Case Western Reserve University have revealed a "biohybrid" robot of their own, except this one runs on slug. The robot was constructed from a harvested sea slug mouth muscle and a two–inch 3–D printed skeleton. When given electric shocks, the bot springs to life and crawls. The tiny muscle belongs to the Aplysia californica, a durable California sea slug also known as a sea hare.