ERC Consolidator Grant · 2025
Learning Matters! The physics of continual learning in biological and soft matter
How many times have you wished you could simply pause your brain, only to find, to your frustration, that it is still busy, revisiting and processing inputs? Response to continual inputs is normal and essential, it is how we learn. In fact, any matter continually responds to input. Yet, our understanding of learning struggles with continual input. I here break with the current focus on the brain to uncover the physics of continual learning matter instead by investigating the emergence of learning bottom-up in life reduced in complexity to a network-shaped single cell – Physarum. Lacking any neurons, flows flushing throughout Physarum’s tubular network propagate input packaged as chemical…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.