Physicists Discover How Slime Mold ‘Makes Decisions’ Without a Brain

The linked website is absolute poison and the answer to the question posed in the title is not answered until like the 27th paragraph or something. Very irritating.

From the abstract of the cited research paper:

Here, we investigate the exploration process of *P. polycephalum* confined by blue light into polygonal shapes up to its escape. While the escape occurs along the longest axis of the polygons, independent of confinement shape, the exploration process prior to escape extends protrusions almost everywhere around a shape boundary. We find protrusions to align with the direction of peristaltic contraction waves driving mass relocation. Mapping out contraction modes during exploration in detail we observe an ongoing switching between different dominant principle contraction modes. Only over the course of time does the organism ultimately settle on the contraction mode most efficient for transport, which coincides with the escape. Thus, we find that only harsh environmental confinement triggers optimal behavior which is reached by long time reorganization of the flow patterns. Our findings provide insights into the mechanics of decision-making in non-neuronal organisms, shedding light on how decentralized systems process environmental constraints to drive adaptive behavior.