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Published online 23 January 2008 | Nature 451, 385 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451385a
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Cellular memory hints at the origins of intelligence
Slime mould displays remarkable rhythmic recall.
Learning and memory — abilities associated with a brain or, at the very least, neuronal activity — have been observed in protoplasmic slime, a unicellular organism with multiple nuclei.
When the amoeba Physarum polycephalum is subjected to a series of shocks at regular intervals, it learns the pattern and changes its behaviour in anticipation of the next one to come1, according to a team of researchers in Japan.
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The team's discovery and this introduction in _Nature_ support our cellular research on tradiational Chinese medicine: Liu TCY, Cheng L, Liu J, Wang SX, Xu XY, Deng SX and Liu SH. 2006. Cellular traditional Chinese medicine on photobiomodulation. Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE, v 6047 II, Fourth International Conference on Photonics and Imaging in Biology and Medicine, 2006, p 60473P. Although yin-yang is one of the basic models of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for TCM objects such as whole body, five zangs or six fus, they are widely used to discuss cellular processes in papers of famous journals such as Cell, Nature, or Science. In this paper, the concept of the degree of difficulty (DD) of a process was put forward in terms of process-specific time from viewpoint of quantum mechanics to redefine yin and yang and extend TCM yin-yang model to DD yin-yang model. It was shown that healthy cells are in DD yin ping yang mi so that there is no photobiomodulation, and there is photobiomodulation on non-healthy cells until the cells become healthy so that photobiomodulation can be called cellular rehabilitation, and DD Yin-Yang inter-transformation holds for our biological information model of photobiomodulation. Moreover, yin-yang antagonism and DD yin-yang interdependence are also supported by a series of experimental studies such as the stimulation of DNA synthesis in HeLa cells after simultaneous irradiation with narrow-band red light and a wide-band cold light, or consecutive irradiation with blue and red light, and the effect of low intensity He-Ne laser irradiation and adrenalin on red blood cell deformability.