[novacole]

For some reason this makes me think these bacteria or the mechanism behind them are the biological precursors to neurons.

[carapace]

You want Micheal Levin's work:

E.g. "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Beyond the Nervous System as Inspiration for New Machine Learning Platforms"

https://media.neurips.cc/Conferences/NIPS2018/Slides/Levin_b...

"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698