Michael Levin is a developmental biologist at Tufts University who studies how the cells of a body use slow electrical signals to work together and build the right shape. His work suggests that problem-solving, memory and goals are not confined to brains, but are found, in simpler forms, in cells, tissues and whole bodies, so that a body is a community of smaller, competent selves. Therapeutic Shamanism has long taught that the body has its own consciousness and intelligence, though Levin, as a scientist, puts his claims far more cautiously.
What does Michael Levin study? #
How bodies come to have the shape they do, and how they repair themselves. He works in developmental biology at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and his research centres on what is called bioelectricity.1 Every cell in the body carries a small electrical charge. In Levin’s words, “Developmental bioelectricity is the ubiquitous exchange of slowly changing ion-based voltage signals within and among cells”, and “All cells are electrically active”.2 Brain cells, he points out, did not invent electrical signalling; they evolved from older cells that were already using it.
These signals are slow, not like the fast firing of nerves: “While the brain operates on millisecond-scale bioelectric spiking, developmental bioelectricity involves steady, slow changes in ion fluxes, resting potentials, and electric fields.” Cells link up with their neighbours through tiny channels called gap junctions, and through them the electrical patterns spread across whole tissues, guiding where a head, an eye or a limb should form.3
What have his experiments shown? #
Some surprising things. One line of his work is with planarians, small flatworms that can regrow a whole body from a fragment. Baluška and Levin report that “memories in planaria survive decapitation – tail fragments trained on a task regenerate brains and then show evidence of recall of the original information.” In other experiments, briefly changing the electrical connections in a piece of worm caused it to grow two heads, and “these 2-headed worms continue to regenerate as 2-headed when cut in subsequent rounds of regeneration, in plain water, months after” the treatment had gone. The worm’s genes had not been edited. Its body’s memory of what shape to be had been rewritten.4
Work with frogs shows the same kind of flexibility. When tadpoles are rearranged in the laboratory so that their eyes and jaws start in the wrong places, “they still make largely normal frog faces”: the parts move about until the face is right. “Tadpoles engineered to develop with eyes on their tails instead of in their usual spot can see quite well, despite the fact that the eyes connect to the spinal cord, not the brain”.5
Why does he speak of intelligence in cells? #
Because of how cells and tissues behave. A growing or healing body seems to know where it is going. “Embryogenesis, regeneration, and metamorphosis stop precisely when the correct anatomical shape has been produced; this is a process akin to goal-directed behaviours.” It can reach the same goal by different routes, cope with the unexpected, and “rests when it is satisfied”.6
So Baluška and Levin say that brains have no monopoly on thinking. “Neural networks have no monopoly on the signalling functions that implement these remarkable algorithms”, and “decisions are made at every level of biological organisation”. Long before there were brains, “cells had to have ways to coordinate their activity in an exquisite ballet”. They describe the same capacities in bacteria, in slime moulds and in plants, where the tips of the roots behave like “brain-like command centres”.7
Levin goes on to picture a body as many selves within selves. Its parts, “organs, cells, and molecular networks”, are “themselves complex and competent in their own native contexts”, and each cell is joined into “a coherent swarm intelligence”.8 Each self, from a single cell to a whole person, has what he calls a “cognitive light cone”: the reach in space and time of what it can sense and try to affect. A tick’s, he says, is very small, since it senses and acts only very locally.9 For Levin, cognition “is not a binary capacity that exists in higher organisms only”, but runs on a continuum.
Isn’t that stretching the word “intelligence”? #
Levin knows the risk. His definition of cognition is “purely functional and minimalist”, and he and Baluška write that “we do not mean the full-blown human-like cognitive performance, or human-type of self-awareness and consciousness.” When he speaks of goals, he means them “in the non-magical, cybernetic, engineering, and control theory sense”.10
But he also says that refusing to see intelligence where it is useful to do so is a mistake of its own. He calls it a “neganthropomorphic fallacy”, an error “as bad for empirical research as is profligate anthropomorphic reasoning”, and he insists that “there is no such thing as magical ‘true cognition’ that is the province of humans”.11 For him the test is practical: such words earn their place if they help scientists predict and work with living bodies.
Does Levin say that cells are conscious? #
Not in so many words. In his 2019 paper he says that “no claims about consciousness” are made, except for some brief remarks at the end. There, he wonders whether “there is something-it-is-like to being a tissue or organ and making decisions”. He adds that a pancreas does not have self-awareness “in the human sense, but it may have as much proto-consciousness as a simple neural network”, and that his model “can perhaps be seen as a form of panpsychism”, the idea that mind is found throughout nature.12 These are offered as possibilities, not findings.
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, though the books do not name Levin. Therapeutic Shamanism teaches that the body is far more than a machine we live in: “In shamanism, the physical body is not just some vehicle for the soul. It is not just some ‘thing’ we inhabit. Rather, it has its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives.” Even the atoms that were once part of us have “their own intelligence and wisdom”.13 See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Therapeutic Shamanism uses a similar picture, though it does not go as far as Levin in what it says of single cells. There is a continuum “with self-awareness at one end and collective-awareness at the other”: “The individual cells of your body have little or no self-awareness, instead they form a collective, that, in your physical life here, allows you to experience yourself as a self-aware and individually-conscious being.” Plants can be seen in the same way, as vast collective beings.14 Of plant intelligence, “as Spock might have said, ‘It is intelligence, Jim, just not as we know it.’”15
And as with Levin, there is a warning here against measuring all intelligence by our own. Tests that define intelligence in human terms, a point drawn from the writer Derrick Jensen, are “garbage in, garbage out”, because the tests are biased.16 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In how far it goes, and how it gets there. Levin’s claims are hypotheses, tested by experiment, and he says little about consciousness. Animism starts from experience: “Animists believe that everything is alive and conscious”, and “This is far more than just a belief, though, for animists actually experience the world in this way.”17
So for Therapeutic Shamanism, consciousness is not something that switches on only at a certain level of complexity. “Everything is conscious”, and “things that are very different to us are still conscious, but just in a way that is different to us.”18 Where Levin speaks cautiously of degrees of ‘proto-consciousness’, animism sees a world full of Peoples, each aware in its own way, and none of them lesser for being different from us. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
