Basal cognition

The idea has precedents in the older literature. William James wrote in 1890 that in the lower forms of life, cognition is nothing more than a guide to appropriate action¹. He described cognition as a moment in what is, in its totality, a motor phenomenon. In 1925 Lotka, in a footnote, reported Tansley's summary of Holt's view that mind is merely the integration of an organism's motor responses to stimuli². Tansley's summary also said that the link between mind and brain remained as dark as ever. These authors tied cognition to action and to simple responses rather than to complex brains.

In the recent work, Biswas, Clawson and Levin (2022) argued that every person has crossed from a bag of biochemical reactions, a quiescent oocyte, to an adult capable of rational thought. They concluded that primitive forms of cognition should be treated as a spectrum extending to unconventional substrates besides mature brains⁴. Ciaunica, Shmeleva and Levin (2023) said that aneural organisms show memory, prediction and learning. They proposed that basal cognition may not need a nervous system or brain⁷. They added that such systems solve problems in metabolic, transcriptional, physiological and anatomical spaces.

Levin (2019) linked basal cognition to development. He argued that complex agents consist of micro-agents selected for proto-cognitive competency, and that this produces the somatic plasticity seen across biology³. He cited tadpoles engineered with eyes on their tails, which see quite well although the eyes connect to the spinal cord rather than the brain³. Biswas and colleagues (2022) tested memory in transcriptional network models. They reported that biological network models resisted edge perturbation better than random networks did⁵. They also noted that signalling pathways can be viewed as proto-cognitive systems.

Reid (2023) reviewed the slime mould Physarum. He noted that its behaviour has been classed as basal, embodied, extended and minimal cognition⁶. He warned that researchers could treat this work as a separate domain through the clever use of definitions. Fábregas-Tejeda and Sims (2025) compared basal cognition with comparative animal cognition. They said that basal cognition seeks cognitive capacities and mechanisms in non-neural organisms outside the animal kingdom⁸. They judged that sweeping scepticism toward the approach may be unwarranted. They also listed cautions that would improve its standing as an evolutionary approach.