Welcome to the Levin lab at Tufts University

Embodied Minds: understanding diverse intelligence in evolved, designed, and hybrid complex systems

Each of us took the remarkable journey from matter to mind. Once we were quiescent egg cells; slowly, gradually, we became human beings capable of advanced metacognition. Our group studies the processes by which intelligence, in myriad conventional and unconventional embodiments, operates in the physical world. We combine developmental biophysics, computer science, and behavioral science to understand how cognition scales up: from the metabolic and physiological competencies of single cells, through the organ-building and repair capabilities of cellular collectives, to the classical behavioral repertoires of whole organisms and swarms. While looking for scale-invariant principles, current work focuses on interrogating non-neural cognition, in particular on the emergence of proto-cognition in cell collectives at both evolutionary and developmental timescales.  

We work at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science. Seeking general principles of life-as-it-can-be, we use a wide range of natural animal models and also create novel synthetic and chimeric life forms. Our goal is to develop generative conceptual frameworks that help us detect, understand, predict, and communicate with truly diverse intelligences, including cells, tissues, organs, synthetic living constructs, robots, and software-based AIs.

Our main model system is morphogenesis: the ability of multicellular bodies to self-assemble, repair, and improvise novel solutions to anatomical goals. We ask questions about the mechanisms required to achieve robust, multiscale, adaptive order in vivo, and about the algorithms sufficient to reproduce this capacity in other substrates. One of our unique specialties is the study of developmental bioelectricity: ways in which all cells connect in somatic electrical networks that store, process, and act on information to control large-scale body structure. Our lab creates and employs tools to read and edit the bioelectric code that guides the proto-cognitive computations of the body, much as neuroscientists are learning to read and write the mental content of the brain.

Our mission is to develop fundamental understanding of how minds of all kinds arise, scale, persist, and change; we seek to use that knowledge to benefit the embodied experience of sentient beings, through biomedicine and beyond.

Learn more about our approach and recent work. If you have any questions, see our FAQ or LevinBot.

Photo credit: Image is modified after "The Neurologist" by Jose Perez