Membrane systems (P systems) are distributed computing models inspired by living cells where a collection of processors jointly achieves a computing task. The problem of maximal independent set (MIS) selection in a graph is to choose a set of nonadjacent nodes to which no further nodes can be added. In this letter, we design a class of simple neural-like P systems to solve the MIS selection problem efficiently in a distributed way. This new class of systems possesses two features that are attractive for both distributed computing and membrane computing: first, the individual processors do not need any information about the overall size of the graph; second, they communicate using only one-bit messages.