As goes a bee, so goes a neuron
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Every decision you make is essentially a committee act. Members chime in, options are weighed, and eventually a single proposal for action is approved by consensus. The committee, of course, is the densely knit society of neurons in your head. And “approved by consensus” is really just a delicate way of saying that the opposition was silenced.
Our brains seem to work not by generating only “correct” actions and executing them in serial, but rather by representing many possibilities in parallel, and suppressing all but one. When this inhibitory action is lost, as happens in people with frontal lobe damage, these multiple possibilities become a burden, and can lead to so-called utilization behaviors. Such impaired individuals will indiscriminately reach for objects placed in front of them - a hairbrush or a hammer, for example - and use them even in inappropriate contexts.
In essence, despite our feeling that we are singular, unified agents, we are more like hive minds unto ourselves, our brains abuzz with multiple, often conflicting plans and interests that must be managed. To Dr. Thomas Seeley, a professor of neurobiology at Cornell University, the “hive mind” is more than just a metaphor. In a recent paper in Science, Seeley and his colleagues describe a potential deep parallel between how brains and bee swarms come to a decision. With no central planner or decider, both brains and bee hives can resolve their inner differences to commit to single courses of action.
To watch a group of bees is to see a frenzy of different interests coalesce into a single, clear thought. This is analogous to neurons in the brain, which must reach a consensus on how to achieve a behavioral goal by positioning the body in space. Bees in a hive must do something similar when deciding where to move the superorganism that is the swarm. Failing to move the swarm as a single, committed unit risks splitting up the hive and losing the queen. Similarly, making a poor move could expose the hive to predators or extreme temperatures.
Like many other decision-makers, the hive’s first order of business before making a springtime move is to consider the various possibilities. Toward this end, several groups of scouts are sent off to search for a suitable new hive. When the scouts return, they each advocate for preferred new sites - often different ones - by performing the famed “waggle dance,” a figure-eight series of movements that tells other bees the direction and distance to a potential new site. These dances recruit other uncommitted bees in the hive to also advocate for the advertised site.
For a while, many scientists thought that this strategy of steadily accumulating “votes” for a particular location was sufficient to explain the hive’s eventual decision. Others, including Seeley and his colleagues, were not satisfied. What happens in cases where similarly sized groups of bees are advocating for different locations? Wouldn’t this be a formula for deadlock?
Seeley suspected that the answer had to do with a head-butting move bees make. To explore this idea, he and his team first set up swarms on an island lacking natural nests, and gave scouts a choice between two identical artificial nesting boxes. Scouts that visited one site were marked with yellow paint, while scouts visiting the other site were marked with pink paint. By tagging these two different populations, Seeley and colleagues had in a sense labeled two competing ideas, which they could then watch unfold and interact back in the collective hive mind.
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9 Comments
Add CommentI found this article regarding the resolution of two or more alternatives for action among bees fascinating, particularly because i have alwasy thought of humans as a "hive animal"... and not just the neuronal mechanisms of making decisions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInstead of "buzzing... butting and waggle dances"... the human animal is constantly in feedback loops of nuanced fascial expressions and bodly language (far more important than mere verbal content) and, for lack of a better term, gossip.
Another possible analogy from the bee hive is the "super intelligence" or hive intelligence is an emergent properly of precisely how bees have evolved within their social context... and likewise, our conscious minds are an emergent properly based on the evolution of our physical neuronal network, our brains.
As a student of the mind I find this utterly fascinating. I wonder if the conviction of the bees has any influence. Can an truly committed smaller number of bees overwhelm a larger number of not so sure bees?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn case of neurons one should consider a memory effect. Neurons have some kind of memory which allows recognizing input patterns and inhibiting or promoting signals.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe question of memory is the hard one. As far as I know, underlying processes are not clear. The brain as a whole has a huge amount of memory, not only personal but also "collective", from numerous generations of ancestors (we call that memory "instinct").
Anyone who has ever flown in a plane knows we are not singular, unified agents but live in our own beehive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the ground, it appears we are all different. But get up in the air, and the entire earth is all patches, looking much like a beehive.
Similarly... watch time-lapse footage of any metropolis on earth... and we look positively robotic or like insects, if filmed at a distance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFree will? ... just a comforting illusion:-)
If one looks at the socialization of individuals evolving into higher mind, the story of course goes two ways. This articles focuses on the more obvious one before us, but not necessarily the more important of the two.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuppose we change focus from the analogy of our brain to this society of bees, to rather how the individual bees incorporated into a single entity -- a single perception and goal, a single mind and heart. Now, lets not focus on the prehistoric past, but rather the rapidly approaching future -- for our evolution is, per force, clearly accelerating.
My fellow bees! The hive is in danger. Socio-economic tsunamis meet with watery ones, as our problems grow daily. And what's our answer so far? Its an individual-bee science, based really on an every queen bee for him/herself and her publish-or-perish prestige "collaboration," enhanced by grad-student worker bees. Corporations purchase money-makers, and countries purchase market advantage and military edge.
Murphy laughs while his hapless prophet Einstein declares: "The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them."
What we need is true networking -- the sense of global self, mutual responsibility. From here, we develop the sensitivity and mentality to bring about that level of thinking that Einstein calls for.
Adapt and survive (nay, thrive!) Birds do it, bees -- do it (so says the article), and we can do it too. Imagine the civilization that will result about the lower functions already available in our Internet/wireless nervous system.
Were Einstein alive today, would this not have been his vision?
Perhaps we should elect bees to Congress.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOK, but this explains random behavior - maladaptive decisions are equally as possible as adaptive decisions. How does "hive learning" and "hive memory" feed into this process - or can a hive have memory and learn from maladaptive behavior? How long does a generation live? How is knowledge or memory transferred to succeeding generations?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI recall sitting on a plane, looking around at all of the individual human beings -- each with their own personality, identity, background and story to tell. Then I thought of the pilots -- each also an individual, raised by very different parents, educated and trained in different places, each distinct individuals with their own stories to tell. And I thought of myself in much the same way -- as a distinct person and not merely a clone or something made from a mold but as an individual different from the other individuals there. Looking down at the ground was interesting but it didn't explain anything.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe were all human beings, of course, but to imagine we were really like bees in a hive is the delusion of people who need the security of being a bee in a hive and not someone who is a responsible actor and accountable for their own choices, values, opinions and beliefs. The fact that we have certain predelictions to follow various heuristics in reasoning or that we all (most of us) see light as light and taste salt as salt only means that we're similar but not the same.