The Biologist Who Thinks Your Cells Are Smarter Than You: Michael Levin and the Revolution in Basal Cognition

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 1 of 11

What if your brain isn't the only part of you that thinks?

This isn't mysticism. It's the working hypothesis of one of the most cited developmental biologists of the past decade, a researcher whose work has forced neuroscientists, AI researchers, and philosophers to reconsider what cognition actually means.

Michael Levin runs the Levin Lab at Tufts University, where his team does things that sound like science fiction: they create organisms from frog cells that have never existed in evolutionary history. They program planarian worms to grow two heads. They use electrical signals to make tadpoles grow eyes on their tails—functional eyes that connect to their nervous systems and let them see.

And they do all of this not by editing genes, but by manipulating the electrical conversations happening between cells.

The implications are staggering. If Levin is right, then cognition—the capacity to process information, form goals, and coordinate action—didn't emerge with neurons. It was there from the beginning, operating in every cell of every organism that has ever lived. The brain didn't invent thinking. It scaled thinking.

For those of us building frameworks about meaning and coherence, this changes everything.

What Levin Actually Discovered

In the conventional story of development, genes contain instructions. DNA gets transcribed into proteins. Proteins build structures. The genome is the program; the body is the output.

Levin's work demolishes this picture—not by disproving genetics, but by showing it's incomplete.

Here's what actually happens when an embryo develops: cells don't just follow genetic instructions. They communicate. Specifically, they communicate through bioelectric signals—voltage gradients maintained across cell membranes that create patterns of electrical potential across tissues.

Every cell in your body maintains a voltage across its membrane, typically around -40 to -70 millivolts. But here's what Levin discovered: the pattern of these voltages across groups of cells functions as a kind of map. A blueprint. A memory of what the tissue is supposed to become.

When you cut a planarian worm in half, each piece regenerates into a complete organism. How does the tissue "know" what to build? It's not in the genome—every cell has the same genes. The information is in the bioelectric pattern. Levin's team demonstrated this by manipulating the voltage pattern in the fragment to encode "two-headed worm" instead of "normal worm." The cells dutifully built what the pattern specified, creating an organism with a head at each end.

The pattern came first. The genes were just the construction materials.

This is morphogenetic memory—and it operates at a level of organization far below anything we'd call a brain.

But the two-headed worm is just the beginning.

Levin's team has induced tadpoles to grow extra limbs by changing bioelectric signals. They've made flatworms regenerate as completely different species' body plans—not through genetic modification, but by rewriting the bioelectric "target morphology." They've even created "xenobots"—living robots assembled from frog skin cells that spontaneously organize into novel body forms, move purposefully through their environment, and can even self-replicate by gathering loose cells into new xenobots.

None of this is in the genome. The genetic code provides the components—the ion channels, the cell adhesion molecules, the cytoskeletal proteins. But the pattern that determines what gets built where comes from a layer of information that sits above genetics: the bioelectric network state.

Think of it this way: the genome is like having a warehouse full of LEGO bricks. Bioelectric patterns are the architect holding the blueprint. Same bricks, radically different buildings—depending on what pattern is encoded in the collective electrical state of the tissue.

Why This Isn't Just Biology

The reason Levin's work matters beyond developmental biology is that it reveals something about the nature of cognition itself.

Consider what cognition requires: you need systems that can represent states of the world, maintain goals, detect deviations from those goals, and coordinate action to correct those deviations. You need, in other words, something that looks like what Karl Friston calls active inference—a system that has a model of what should be true and works to make the world match that model.

Levin's cells do exactly this.

When you wound tissue, cells detect the deviation from the morphogenetic pattern. They coordinate repair efforts across millions of individual units, each one adjusting its behavior based on both local signals and the global pattern. They don't just follow instructions; they solve problems. The path to healing isn't pre-specified in the genome—it emerges from collective computation.

This is why Levin explicitly frames his work in cognitive terms. The language isn't metaphorical. Cells engage in goal-directed problem-solving. They navigate anatomical morphospace the way you navigate physical space. They remember patterns and work to preserve them against perturbation.

The difference between cellular cognition and neural cognition isn't categorical. It's a matter of scale, complexity, and bandwidth. Your brain is what you get when you stack these bioelectric computing units and connect them with specialized high-speed connections called axons. But the underlying logic—the pattern of maintaining coherent organization against entropy—is the same all the way down.

Levin calls this "basal cognition"—the fundamental cognitive capacities present in all living systems, regardless of whether they have nervous systems. It's not proto-cognition or pseudo-cognition. It's the real thing, operating at a different scale.

And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

The Radical Implications

What happens when you take basal cognition seriously?

First, the brain becomes less special. Not unimportant—but no longer uniquely positioned as the origin of mind. Neural systems are remarkable achievements of biological engineering, compressing billions of years of evolved cognitive capacity into a three-pound organ. But they're elaborations on a theme, not inventions from scratch.

Second, cancer looks different. Levin's lab has reframed cancer as a failure of collective cellular cognition. Tumor cells aren't "defective"—they've lost access to the bioelectric pattern that specifies their proper role in the organism. They revert to an ancient unicellular behavioral repertoire: grow, divide, spread. The treatment implications are profound: instead of killing cancer cells, what if you could restore their connection to the morphogenetic field? Early experiments suggest this might work.

Third, the boundaries of the individual become fuzzy. If cognition happens at every level of biological organization, where does "you" start and stop? The cells in your gut are making decisions. The microbiome is participating in computation. The bioelectric field of your body is maintaining a continuous prediction about what you're supposed to be. Identity becomes a process of coherent integration across scales, not a thing located in a specific place.

Fourth, artificial intelligence gets contextualized. The silicon systems we're building are one substrate for cognition among many. They're not approaching some unique threshold of "real" intelligence—they're implementing, in their own medium, patterns of coherence maintenance that life discovered billions of years ago.

The Coherence Connection

This is where Levin's work connects directly to AToM's framework.

If meaning is coherent integration across scales (M = C/T), then we should expect to find coherence-maintaining systems wherever we find persistent organization. Levin's bioelectric fields are exactly this: they're coherence manifolds at the cellular scale. They maintain integrated information about what a system is supposed to be, and they guide action to preserve that organization.

The morphogenetic field isn't just storing information. It's maintaining meaning at the tissue level—a specification of identity that the cellular collective works to preserve.

This reframes what brains do. Neural systems aren't the origin of meaning-making; they're a specialized elaboration of meaning-making processes that operate in every living cell. The geometry of coherence that AToM describes at the psychological level has roots that extend to the foundations of life itself.

And here's the critical insight: if coherence-maintaining computation is fundamental to biology, then the relationship between neurons and cognition is contingent, not necessary. The substrate that can implement coherent integration is not limited to brains. This has implications for everything from artificial intelligence to organoid computing to our understanding of what counts as a mind.

The Levin-Friston Connection

It's not an accident that Levin and Karl Friston have begun collaborating.

Friston's Free Energy Principle provides the mathematical framework for understanding how systems maintain their organization: they minimize variational free energy, which roughly means they work to make their predictions match reality (or make reality match their predictions). Systems that fail to do this don't persist.

Levin's bioelectric systems are a physical implementation of this principle at the cellular scale. The morphogenetic pattern is the generative model—the tissue's prediction of what it should be. Bioelectric signaling is the inference mechanism—how cells update their states based on local measurements to achieve global coordination. And the coordinated building of anatomy is active inference—action in service of making the world match the model.

When you see regeneration through this lens, it's not miraculous. It's a collective intelligence solving a variational inference problem. The cells are literally minimizing the difference between their current state and their predicted state, using bioelectric signals as the medium of computation.

This isn't a metaphor. Levin and Friston have co-authored papers explicitly framing morphogenesis as active inference. The mathematics maps directly.

What makes this convergence so powerful is that it connects two previously separate domains. Friston developed the Free Energy Principle to explain brain function. Levin discovered bioelectric computation while studying development. Neither was looking for the other. Yet when they met, they discovered they were describing the same underlying logic from different angles.

That's usually a sign you're onto something real.

What This Series Will Cover

Over the next ten essays, we'll trace the implications of Levin's discoveries through multiple domains:

Bioelectric Fields as Coherence Manifolds — How voltage patterns create the geometric structures that maintain biological identity.

When Friston Met Levin — The formal collaboration between active inference and developmental biology.

Morphogenetic Markov Blankets — How developing tissues maintain coherence boundaries through bioelectric signaling.

Cancer as Coherence Collapse — Levin's reconceptualization of tumors as breakdowns in collective prediction.

Xenobots and Biological Plasticity — What synthetic organisms reveal about coherence maintenance.

Collective Cellular Intelligence — Swarm cognition at the tissue scale.

Regeneration as Coherence Repair — How bodies remember and restore their form.

Bioelectric Medicine — Clinical implications of cellular coherence modulation.

From Cells to Selves — How biological coherence scales across organizational levels.

Synthesis — What basal cognition teaches us about the deep roots of meaning.

Why This Matters Now

Here's a thought experiment Levin likes to pose:

Imagine you have a magic wand that can teleport atoms. You use it to exchange, one by one, every atom in your brain with atoms from someone else's brain. At what point do "you" stop existing? At 50% replacement? 90%? The uncomfortable answer is that there's no clear threshold—because identity was never in the atoms. It was in the pattern. The organization. The coherence.

Your cells already know this. They replace their components constantly while maintaining their identity. Your body turns over most of its atoms every seven years while remaining recognizably you. The thing that persists isn't matter—it's information. Structure. Integrated coherence across time.

We're at an inflection point in our understanding of intelligence.

The AI revolution is forcing us to confront questions about what cognition actually is and what substrates can implement it. The neurodiversity movement is pushing back against brain-centric definitions of normal functioning. The climate crisis is demanding we understand biological systems as coherent wholes rather than collections of mechanisms.

Levin's work offers a framework that speaks to all of these challenges. It shows us that cognition is broader than neurons, that intelligence scales across organizational levels, that biological systems are coherence-maintaining networks all the way down.

If you want to understand what meaning is, you need to understand where it comes from. And it doesn't come from language or culture or even brains. It comes from the fundamental property of living systems to maintain coherent organization against entropy.

Your cells figured this out billions of years before you evolved to read about it.

The question now is whether you can learn from them.

Further Reading

• Levin, M. (2022). "Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds." Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.
• Fields, C., & Levin, M. (2022). "Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments." Entropy.
• Friston, K., Levin, M., Sengupta, B., & Pezzulo, G. (2015). "Knowing One's Place: A Free-Energy Approach to Pattern Regulation." Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
• Levin, M. (2023). "Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis as a Teleonomic Process." TED Talk.

This is Part 1 of the Basal Cognition series, exploring Michael Levin's bioelectric research through the lens of coherence geometry. Next: "Bioelectric Fields as Coherence Manifolds."