Is your Congressman smarter than a slime mold?

It could be close:

"To the scientists now making it a subject of serious study, it is Physarum polycephalum—a unicellular organism that grows to be centimeters-to-meters large and sometimes contains thousands of nuclei. Although slime molds lack eyes, ears, and a brain, they are smart. They keep time: if blown with cold air on the first of every hour, by the third hour, they’ll retract just before the cold snap. They exhibit memory, remembering the locations of food sources, as well as problem-solving skills, completing complex mazes in search of oatmeal. They can even recreate the hyper-efficient Tokyo subway map when oat flakes—their favorite food—stand in for population centers...

Now, researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University have discovered another thing Physarum can do: detect objects at a distance without physically coming into contact with them. The sightless slime mold uses its body to sense objects (in a process called mechanosensation) and then decides whether to grow toward them based on their mass and mass distribution...

Scientists still don’t know how the slime mold, lacking any neural architecture whatsoever, processes the sensory input from the TRP channels. Like an eye’s retina, TRP channels gather the information, but the organism still requires some cognitive mechanism to make sense of it...

[T]his research on slime mold highlights how previous understandings of cognition may have been too in-the-box, constrained to familiar forms. “Cognition is all around you. It really is everywhere,” says Levin. “And really, it’s not just for furry, brainy things.”