The Levin Songbook

[Intro: solo clarinet, slow and free, then the band kicks in]
Oy, oy, oy, the cells have a plan!

[Verse 1]
Down at Tufts there's a worm in a dish,
cut it in three and it grows back the rest.
Fallon Durant gave the middle a dose,
now it grows two heads, and it keeps growing those.
Cut it again in plain water, no drug,
two heads again, so the lab dug and dug.

[Chorus]
Oy, the body is electric, the voltage knows the plan,
the cells all hold a pattern, like a map in someone's hand.
Michael Levin makes a proposal and the lab puts it to the test,
then the frogs and the worms and the tadpoles get to vote on the rest.
Hey! Freylekhs for the field! Hey! Freylekhs for the cell!
Hey! Nobody edited a gene, and it still turned out well!

[Verse 2]
Vaibhav Pai found a voltage that means "build an eye",
set it on a tadpole's gut, and an eye grew there, oh my.
Dany Spencer Adams filmed a face made of light,
the voltage map of a face before the face was in sight.
With Laura Vandenberg and Levin she scrambled tadpole faces,
and the eyes and the jaws moved back to their proper places.

[Chorus]
Oy, the body is electric, the voltage knows the plan,
the cells all hold a pattern, like a map in someone's hand.
Michael Levin makes a proposal and the lab puts it to the test,
then the frogs and the worms and the tadpoles get to vote on the rest.
Hey! Freylekhs for the field! Hey! Freylekhs for the cell!
Hey! Nobody edited a gene, and it still turned out well!

[Verse 3: faster]
Doug Blackiston took some frog skin cells out of the frog,
Sam Kriegman and Josh Bongard evolved the shapes inside a computer,
then Doug built them by hand with tiny tools, and nothing could be cuter.
Xenobots! They swim, they sweep up loose cells in a pile,
they heal a little cut, and that's the list, but what a list, what a style!
Gizem Gumuskaya took cells from a human airway,
anthrobots rolled on a scratch in a dish of neurons, and the neurons grew across the way.

[Bridge: slow doina, clarinet and voice]
Santosh Manicka models networks made of voltage, not of wire,
Léo Pio-Lopez reads a body as inference, aiming higher,
Patrick McMillen writes collective intelligence across every scale,
oy, and the papers keep on coming, like a long, long tale.

[Verse 4: the friends from outside]
Chris Fields writes with Levin about the spaces minds can roam,
Karl Friston brought free energy, a cell knowing its place, its home,
Richard Watson says evolution learns the way a mind learns,
Adam Goldstein sorted numbers, and the numbers took surprising turns.

[Final Chorus: double time, everyone shouting the heys]
Oy, the body is electric, the voltage knows the plan,
the cells all hold a pattern, like a map in someone's hand.
Michael Levin makes a proposal and the lab puts it to the test,
then the frogs and the worms and the tadpoles get to vote on the rest.
Hey! Freylekhs for the field! Hey! Freylekhs for the cell!
Hey! Nobody edited a gene, and it still turned out well!

[Outro: clarinet laugh, one last hey]
Oy, the cells have a plan!
Hey!

Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine, Nano Banana from prompts by Claude, Gemini, Grok, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• FIGURE 7 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Movie S2 from Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2020), “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms”, PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1910837117. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; still frame from the supplementary movie.
• Fig. 1 from Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2020), “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms”, PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1910837117. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 3 from Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2020), “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms”, PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1910837117. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 1 from Gumuskaya G, Srivastava P, Cooper BG, Lesser H, Semegran B, Garnier S, Levin M (2023), “Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells”, Advanced Science. 10.1002/advs.202303575. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 6 from Gumuskaya G, Srivastava P, Cooper BG, Lesser H, Semegran B, Garnier S, Levin M (2023), “Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells”, Advanced Science. 10.1002/advs.202303575. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 1 from Manicka S, Levin M (2019), “Modeling somatic computation with non-neural bioelectric networks”, Scientific Reports. 10.1038/s41598-019-54859-8. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 2 from Pio-Lopez L, Kuchling F, Tung A, Pezzulo G, Levin M (2022), “Active inference, morphogenesis, and computational psychiatry”, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. 10.3389/fncom.2022.988977. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 2 from McMillen P, Levin M (2024), “Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates”, Communications Biology. 10.1038/s42003-024-06037-4. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 1 from Fields C, Levin M (2022), “Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments”, Entropy. 10.3390/e24060819. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 5 from McMillen P, Levin M (2024), “Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates”, Communications Biology. 10.1038/s42003-024-06037-4. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.

Who's in the song, and their work

• Fallon Durant: Durant et al. 2017, the two-headed planaria
• Vaibhav Pai: Pai et al. 2012, eye patterning by voltage
• Dany Spencer Adams and Laura Vandenberg: Vandenberg, Adams & Levin 2012, the scrambled-face tadpoles
• Douglas Blackiston, Sam Kriegman and Josh Bongard: Kriegman, Blackiston, Levin & Bongard 2020, xenobots
• Gizem Gumuskaya: Gumuskaya et al. 2023, anthrobots
• Santosh Manicka: Manicka & Levin 2019, bioelectric networks
• Léo Pio-Lopez: Pio-Lopez et al. 2022, active inference and morphogenesis
• Patrick McMillen: McMillen & Levin 2024, collective intelligence
• Chris Fields: Fields & Levin 2022, navigating arbitrary spaces
• Karl Friston: Friston, Levin, Sengupta & Pezzulo 2015, Knowing one's place
• Richard Watson: Watson & Levin 2023, the collective intelligence of evolution and development
• Adam Goldstein: Zhang, Goldstein & Levin 2024, sorting algorithms

Only real people and their published work. No anecdotes, and nothing here is endorsed by them or the Levin lab.

[Intro: pulsing synth arpeggio]
How far, how far, how far can you care?

[Verse 1]
A bacterium swims up a sugar trail,
it cares about the next few seconds, and a few microns of space.
A dog knows the yard and the people inside,
it can wait for tomorrow, if tomorrow has a walk.

[Pre-Chorus]
Michael Levin draws it as a cone,
across is space, and up is time,
the biggest goal that you can hold
is the size of your mind.

[Chorus]
How far can you care?
How far ahead, how far out there?
Draw me a cone of what you can hold,
a minute, a meadow, a planet, a hundred years.
How far can you care?

[Verse 2]
One cell alone keeps its own little state,
its voltage, its sugar, the next few minutes.
Join it to neighbors through tiny gates,
and the group can work on a limb, on its shape, on its size.

[Pre-Chorus]
The goal is bigger than any part,
no single cell can see the arm,
but wire them up and share the signal,
and the cone grows wide.

[Chorus]
How far can you care?
How far ahead, how far out there?
Draw me a cone of what you can hold,
a minute, a meadow, a planet, a hundred years.
How far can you care?

[Bridge: synths drop to a single pad]
So what about a machine?
What about a team of minds?
Levin says you cannot tell from what it's made of,
you have to test the goals it finds.

[Final Chorus: full band, key change]
How far can we care?
How far ahead, how far out there?
Draw me a cone of what we can hold,
a person and a team of minds, one goal.
How far can we care?

[Outro]
How far, how far, how far can you care?

Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine from prompts by Gemini, Grok, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• Figure 2 from Levin M (2019), “The Computational Boundary of a "Self": Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition”, Frontiers in Psychology. 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02688. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 3 from Levin M (2019), “The Computational Boundary of a "Self": Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition”, Frontiers in Psychology. 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02688. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 4 from Levin M (2019), “The Computational Boundary of a "Self": Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition”, Frontiers in Psychology. 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02688. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 2 from McMillen P, Levin M (2024), “Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates”, Communications Biology. 10.1038/s42003-024-06037-4. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 4 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 5 from Fields C, Levin M (2022), “Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments”, Entropy. 10.3390/e24060819. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 10 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.

[Intro: banjo roll and fiddle]

[Verse 1]
I'm a little flatworm, a planarian,
cut me into pieces and I'll grow back again.
Every piece knows which end needs a head,
and which end needs a tail, that's how the tale is read.

[Chorus]
So cut me again, cut me again,
I'll grow what I'm missing and be whole again.
The plan isn't only in my DNA,
there's a voltage pattern that shows the way.
Cut me again.

[Verse 2]
Down in the Levin lab they gave me a dose,
a drug that closed the gaps where my cell signals go.
Just a short while, then they washed it away,
and my middle piece grew two heads that day.

[Chorus]
So cut me again, cut me again,
I'll grow what I'm missing and be whole again.
The plan isn't only in my DNA,
there's a voltage pattern that shows the way.
Cut me again.

[Verse 3]
Then they cut me again in plain water, no drug,
and the pieces grew two heads, the same as before.
Not one gene was changed, not a letter was new,
the lab reads it as a pattern the body holds onto.

[Bridge: just fiddle and voice]
Now I won't tell you that I hold a picture inside,
the scientists are careful, and they test what they find.
But a moment of change made a change that stayed,
and that's the part that keeps them up at night, they say.

[Final Chorus: full band, harmonies]
So cut me again, cut me again,
I'll grow what I'm missing and be whole again.
The plan isn't only in my DNA,
there's a voltage pattern that shows the way.
Cut me again, cut me again.

[Outro: banjo tag]
Two heads are better than one, I guess.

Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine from prompts by Gemini, Grok, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• FIGURE 7 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 5 from McMillen P, Levin M (2024), “Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates”, Communications Biology. 10.1038/s42003-024-06037-4. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 2 from Pio-Lopez L, Kuchling F, Tung A, Pezzulo G, Levin M (2022), “Active inference, morphogenesis, and computational psychiatry”, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. 10.3389/fncom.2022.988977. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 3 from Fields C, Levin M (2022), “Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments”, Entropy. 10.3390/e24060819. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 6 from Levin M (2023), “Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology”, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. 10.1007/s00018-023-04790-z. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.

[Intro: horns and a tambourine]
Ooh, I'm gonna find my face.

[Verse 1]
They mixed me up when I was small,
an eye up high, a jaw where a jaw shouldn't be at all,
my nose was wandering off to the side,
I was a tadpole with a scrambled face, but I had my pride.

[Pre-Chorus]
Nobody drew me a map,
nobody told me the way,
but I kept on moving, moving, moving,
a little closer every day.

[Chorus]
I'm gonna find my face, find my face,
every part's gonna move to its proper place.
I don't know the road, but I know where I'm going,
I'm gonna find my face.

[Verse 2]
The eye took a path that no one planned,
the jaw swung around like it had somewhere to land,
and when I became a frog, I was close to the way frogs should look,
not by the recipe, but not by luck, I took a different route.

[Pre-Chorus]
Same place from any start,
that's what a goal looks like,
it's what the lab calls navigation,
in a space of shapes, a space of life.

[Chorus]
I'm gonna find my face, find my face,
every part's gonna move to its proper place.
I don't know the road, but I know where I'm going,
I'm gonna find my face.

[Bridge: drums drop, bass and handclaps]
Laura and Dany and Michael watched me grow,
they wrote it down in twenty-twelve, so now you know.
A body heads for the target it holds,
if you knock it off course, it corrects as it goes.

[Final Chorus: key change, full horns]
I'm gonna find my face, find my face,
every part's gonna move to its proper place.
I don't know the road, but I know where I'm going,
I'm gonna find my face, oh, I'm gonna find my face.

[Outro]
Right there, that's my face.

Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine from prompts by Gemini, Grok, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• Fig. 6 from Levin M (2023), “Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology”, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. 10.1007/s00018-023-04790-z. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 3 from Fields C, Levin M (2022), “Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments”, Entropy. 10.3390/e24060819. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 6 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 9 from Pio-Lopez L, Kuchling F, Tung A, Pezzulo G, Levin M (2022), “Active inference, morphogenesis, and computational psychiatry”, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. 10.3389/fncom.2022.988977. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 7 from McMillen P, Levin M (2024), “Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates”, Communications Biology. 10.1038/s42003-024-06037-4. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.

[Intro: nylon guitar, soft brushes]

[Verse 1]
If you want to change a clock, you take it apart,
you move a gear, you turn a screw, you wind it from the start.
If you want to change a thermostat, you set a different mark,
it does the rest itself, all day and through the dark.

[Chorus]
How persuadable are you?
What does it take to change what you do?
A wrench, a goal, a reward, or a reason?
Show me what works, and I'll know what you're made of.

[Verse 2]
If you want to change a dog, you give a treat, you train,
you do not rewire the neurons in its brain.
If you want to change a friend, you talk, you make your case,
you give them reasons, and they choose, and they change their place.

[Chorus]
How persuadable are you?
What does it take to change what you do?
A wrench, a goal, a reward, or a reason?
Show me what works, and I'll know what you're made of.

[Bridge: just voice and guitar]
Michael Levin calls it TAME,
a way to look at minds of every size,
don't decide from the armchair what something can do,
try your tools on it, and let the trying be your eyes.

[Verse 3]
Cells can be trained, and tissues hold a goal,
so maybe your body is more persuadable than you were told.
And what about the machines we talk to every day?
The only honest way to know is to test, he'd say.

[Final Chorus: strings come in]
How persuadable are you?
What does it take to change what you do?
A wrench, a goal, a reward, or a reason?
Show me what works, and I'll know what you're made of.
Show me what works, and I'll know what you are.

Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine from prompts by Gemini, Grok, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• FIGURE 2 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 1 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 3 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 11 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 2 from Fields C, Levin M (2022), “Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments”, Entropy. 10.3390/e24060819. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 5 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.

[Intro: twangy surf guitar, drums]
Same cells! New shapes!

[Verse 1]
Take some skin cells from a frog embryo,
set them free in a dish and let them go.
They don't build skin on a frog anymore,
they grow tiny hairs and they swim across the floor.

[Chorus]
Same cells, new shapes,
same genes, no edits, no tapes,
where does the form come from? Nobody can say for sure,
same cells, new shapes, and the lab wants to know more.

[Verse 2]
Xenobots! They sweep up loose cells in a pile,
they heal a little cut, they swim for a while.
That's what they do, it's a short list, it's true,
but nobody wrote that list, so where'd it come from? Who?

[Chorus]
Same cells, new shapes,
same genes, no edits, no tapes,
where does the form come from? Nobody can say for sure,
same cells, new shapes, and the lab wants to know more.

[Verse 3]
Then Gizem took cells from a human airway,
grown in a gel, they rolled out to play.
Anthrobots! On a scratch in a dish of nerve cells,
the neurons grew across the gap, and that's what the paper tells.

[Bridge: drums only, then guitar]
A genome is a parts list, it's not a picture of the whole,
the cells can build a frog, or a little swimming ball.
The same hardware can make a different thing,
and that's the question Levin wants to bring.

[Final Chorus: double guitars]
Same cells, new shapes,
same genes, no edits, no tapes,
where does the form come from? Nobody can say for sure,
same cells, new shapes, and the lab wants to know more!

[Outro]
Same cells! New shapes!

Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine from prompts by Gemini, Grok, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• Fig. 1 from Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2020), “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms”, PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1910837117. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 3 from Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2020), “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms”, PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1910837117. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 4 from Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2020), “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms”, PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1910837117. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 1 from Gumuskaya G, Srivastava P, Cooper BG, Lesser H, Semegran B, Garnier S, Levin M (2023), “Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells”, Advanced Science. 10.1002/advs.202303575. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 2 from Gumuskaya G, Srivastava P, Cooper BG, Lesser H, Semegran B, Garnier S, Levin M (2023), “Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells”, Advanced Science. 10.1002/advs.202303575. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 6 from Gumuskaya G, Srivastava P, Cooper BG, Lesser H, Semegran B, Garnier S, Levin M (2023), “Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells”, Advanced Science. 10.1002/advs.202303575. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 1 from Gumuskaya G, Davey N, Srivastava P, Bender A, Pio-Lopez L, Hazel D, Levin M (2025), “The Morphological, Behavioral, and Transcriptomic Life Cycle of Anthrobots”, Advanced Science. 10.1002/advs.202409330. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Movie S2 from Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2020), “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms”, PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1910837117. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; still frame from the supplementary movie.
• Movie S2 from Gumuskaya G, Davey N, Srivastava P, Bender A, Pio-Lopez L, Hazel D, Levin M (2025), “The Morphological, Behavioral, and Transcriptomic Life Cycle of Anthrobots”, Advanced Science. 10.1002/advs.202409330. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; still frame from the supplementary movie.

[Intro: 8-bit bleeps, swing horns]
Five, two, nine, one, seven, three...

[Verse 1]
Bubble sort, a classic, a few lines of code,
you'd think you know everything it does, every road.
But Taining and Adam and Michael gave it a twist,
each number gets to move itself, there's no one with a list.

[Chorus]
Let the numbers sort themselves, let them find their place,
every number has a little rule, and a little space.
Nobody's in charge, nobody's at the top,
and they get there anyway, before they stop.

[Verse 2]
Then they broke a number, made it stuck, it wouldn't budge,
and the others found a way around it, without a nudge.
Sometimes they went the wrong way for a while,
to get around the trouble, then they lined up in style.

[Chorus]
Let the numbers sort themselves, let them find their place,
every number has a little rule, and a little space.
Nobody's in charge, nobody's at the top,
and they get there anyway, before they stop.

[Verse 3]
Mix up two kinds of rules in a single row,
and the numbers with the same rule tend to cluster, did you know?
Nobody wrote that in, it's not in the code,
it's a little bit of something extra on the road.

[Bridge: swing breakdown]
Now it's just a sorting job, it's not a mind,
but if this much surprise is in a few short lines,
then the code is not the same as knowing what it'll do,
and that goes for the big machines too.

[Final Chorus: full swing band and chiptune]
Let the numbers sort themselves, let them find their place,
every number has a little rule, and a little space.
Nobody's in charge, nobody's at the top,
and they get there anyway, before they stop.

[Outro]
One, two, three, five, seven, nine. Sorted.

Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine from prompts by Gemini, Grok, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• Figure 6 from Fields C, Levin M (2022), “Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments”, Entropy. 10.3390/e24060819. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 1 from Levin M (2023), “Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology”, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. 10.1007/s00018-023-04790-z. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 8 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.

[Intro: gospel organ, soft]

[Verse 1]
There was a cell inside a body, working with the rest,
sharing signals with its neighbors, building what the body needs.
Then it closed its little doors, it stopped hearing from the rest,
and the body turned into its outside world.

[Pre-Chorus]
Michael Levin has an idea,
that's all it is, and he says so,
that a cell cut off from the network
can forget the bigger goal.

[Chorus]
Come back to the body, come back to the plan,
hear your neighbors' voltage, take the body's hand.
Your self got small when you went it alone,
come back to the body, come back home.

[Verse 2]
In tadpoles in his lab, Brook Chernet and Michael tried,
they set the cells' voltage, from the outside.
The cancer gene was still there, still switched on,
but tumors were less likely when the voltage was right.

[Chorus]
Come back to the body, come back to the plan,
hear your neighbors' voltage, take the body's hand.
Your self got small when you went it alone,
come back to the body, come back home.

[Bridge: choir hums, voice alone]
Now hear me, this is not a cure,
cancer has a hundred causes, and doctors know much more.
This is one experiment and one way to see,
a question the lab is asking, carefully.

[Final Chorus: full choir, key change]
Come back to the body, come back to the plan,
hear your neighbors' voltage, take the body's hand.
Your self got small when you went it alone,
come back to the body, come back home.
Come back home.

[Outro: organ]

Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine from prompts by Gemini, Grok, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• Fig. 4 from McMillen P, Levin M (2024), “Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates”, Communications Biology. 10.1038/s42003-024-06037-4. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 4 from Levin M (2019), “The Computational Boundary of a "Self": Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition”, Frontiers in Psychology. 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02688. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 10 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 9 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.

[Intro: piano and string quartet, slow]

[Verse 1]
The angles of a triangle add up the same in every land,
no gene decided that, no wind, no sea, no hand.
A prime is prime before we count, a circle's pi is fixed,
we find these things, we don't build them, they come before the mix.

[Chorus]
Where do shapes come from?
Not only from the genes, not only from the sun,
maybe some come from a space of forms,
and drop into the world through bodies as they're born.
Where do shapes come from?

[Verse 2]
The xenobots were never chosen, never selected to be,
and still they swim and gather, with a form that's plain to see.
Levin asks where that form was kept, before the cells were free,
and he proposes a space of patterns, like mathematics, waiting there.

[Chorus]
Where do shapes come from?
Not only from the genes, not only from the sun,
maybe some come from a space of forms,
and drop into the world through bodies as they're born.
Where do shapes come from?

[Bridge: choir enters softly]
He calls it ingression, the way a pattern comes in,
through a body, or a machine, through anything we build.
He says it's a research program, not a fact we've won,
a map of the space is the work still to be done.

[Final Chorus: full choir and strings]
Where do shapes come from?
Not only from the genes, not only from the sun,
maybe some come from a space of forms,
and drop into the world through bodies as they're born.
Where do minds come from?

[Outro: piano alone]
Where do shapes come from?

Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine from prompts by Gemini, Grok, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• Fig. 2 from Levin M (2023), “Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology”, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. 10.1007/s00018-023-04790-z. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 8 from Levin M (2023), “Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology”, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. 10.1007/s00018-023-04790-z. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Fig. 3 from Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2020), “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms”, PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1910837117. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Figure 1 from Gumuskaya G, Davey N, Srivastava P, Bender A, Pio-Lopez L, Hazel D, Levin M (2025), “The Morphological, Behavioral, and Transcriptomic Life Cycle of Anthrobots”, Advanced Science. 10.1002/advs.202409330. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• FIGURE 5 from Levin M (2022), “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; placed on a blurred background.
• Movie S2 from Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J (2020), “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms”, PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1910837117. CC BY 4.0; cropped or scaled to 16:9; still frame from the supplementary movie.

[Intro: harmonica wail over a shuffle]
Well, I got a question, I been sitting on it too long

[Verse 1]
I got a big soft armchair and a theory in my head,
I said a cell can't think, it's just chemistry, I said.
It's got no brain, no cortex, so its mind must be zero,
then a flatworm grew two heads and made a fool of my hero.

[Chorus]
You can't find the answer sitting in an armchair,
you gotta get up, go and do the experiment there.
Don't decide it with a feeling, don't decide it with a frown,
you have to do experiments, and then you find out.
Get up out of the armchair.

[Verse 2]
Now my neighbor took the other side, he said the weather's got a mind,
I said, well, does it learn? Does it get used to wind over time?
Neither one of us had tested it, we just argued in our seats,
then the scientist said, "I have no idea, let's find out what it keeps."

[Chorus]
You can't find the answer sitting in an armchair,
you gotta get up, go and do the experiment there.
Don't decide it with a feeling, don't decide it with a frown,
you have to do experiments, and then you find out.
Get up out of the armchair.

[Bridge: stop time]
They said a gene network's just physics, there's no mind in there,
so they tried to train it, like you'd train a dog, with care.
And it learned. It remembered. Who'd have guessed it from a chair?
Run the test, and you'll know what's there.

[Verse 3]
They scrambled up a tadpole's face, the eye where the jaw should be,
and the parts moved back to make a face, just like they're meant to be.
You couldn't call it, sitting there, you had to watch it go,
the only way to know a thing is go and find out so.

[Final Chorus]
You can't find the answer sitting in an armchair,
you gotta get up, go and do the experiment there.
Don't decide it with a feeling, don't decide it with a frown,
you have to do experiments, and then you find out.
You can't find the answer sitting in an armchair,
get up out of the armchair.

[Outro: harmonica and a last shuffle]
Then you find out.

The hook is Mike Wolf's paraphrase of a point Levin makes in more than 20 talks. The chorus line "you have to do experiments, and then you find out" is Levin's. Music: Suno v6, from lyrics and a style prompt by Claude. Pictures drawn by Grok Imagine from prompts by Grok, Gemini, OpenAI Sol; art direction by Claude. The drawn pictures are not likenesses of anyone.

Figures from the papers

• Levin M. 2022. Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. FIGURE 7
• Levin M. 2023. Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology. Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. Fig. 6
• Pio-Lopez L, Kuchling F, Tung A, Pezzulo G, Levin M. 2022. Active inference, morphogenesis, and computational psychiatry. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. Figure 2