Made entirely of muscle, with no rigid skeleton, muscular hydrostats like octopus arms, elephant trunks, and human tongues can move in ways traditional mechanical systems cannot. Between crawling across the sea floor, picking up a peanut, and enabling speech, scientists have long wondered how soft structures can perform so many different functions without becoming impossible to control.
Researchers in Vickie Webster-Wood’s lab have uncovered part of the answer. A new study published in iScience found that the muscular hydrostat feeding organ of the sea slug, Aplysia californica, doesn’t rely on the nervous system to solve its every movement, rather it physically reconfigures its anatomy depending on the task at hand. This allows the sea slug to efficiently bite or reject food.
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These findings, built on past research from the lab, offer new evidence in the growing field of integrated mechanical and computational intelligence, which presents the idea that intelligence emerges not only from computation in the brain, but also from the design and mechanics of the body itself.
“This idea of the body being important in computation and control is not new, and there are many names for different aspects of this phenomenon, from mechanical intelligence to physical intelligence,” said Webster-Wood, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. “While there are slight nuances to each term, the ideas boil down to the concept that the dynamics and mechanics of the physical system, or its interaction with the environment, can take the place of a higher-level controller. Essentially, instead of having to control every minute detail of motion with a computer, the mechanics of the body simplify the type of control signals and networks needed.”
