Lectures on Tap

Intelligence is usually framed as something that belongs to brains. This talk starts from a far stranger question: what if it doesn't? Focusing on organisms that solve problems without anything resembling a nervous system, the lecture explores how simple forms of life make decisions, adapt and respond to their surroundings. It is the kind of scientific topic that quietly reshapes the way you think long after the evening ends, making familiar ideas about cognition feel less settled than they did before you walked in. The bar setting also suits the subject surprisingly well, encouraging questions and conversation instead of the formality of a campus lecture hall. Come for an intriguing biological puzzle, stay because it is rare to find a science talk that can make slime molds and single-celled organisms feel genuinely relevant to how we define intelligence.