The researchers found that the yellow and pink-painted scouts displayed waggle dances advertising for their respective nests. In addition, however, the scouts were also seen to make brief buzzing head-butts to one another’s head and thorax. Dancing bees tended to receive head-butts toward the end of their dances, suggesting that the head butts were a signal to stop dancing. The most interesting finding came when looking at who was head-butting whom. Yellow-marked bees tended to receive these putative stop signals from pink-marked bees, and vice versa. In other words, the two different populations were mutually inhibiting one another - one proposal pitted against another.
The result of this arrangement is that it amplifies small differences between different populations of scouts, setting up a kind of winner-take-all scenario. Without inhibitory stop signals, the hive would be able to sustain multiple competing interests, as different groups of scouts accumulate more and more votes until the hive reaches some stable, but divided state. With stop signals, divided hive states are far less stable. A slight preponderance of one group of scouts will translate into greater inhibition of other groups of scouts, turning an initially small numerical advantage into a more sizable one. Over several iterations of this process, an initial slight majority is amplified into a consensus.
Ideally, a follow-up experiment would have eliminated the bees’ stop signals and studied the consequences on the hive’s decision process. Since this is nearly impossible to do, Seeley and his colleagues opted for a simulation based approach instead. In their models of collective bee activity, cross-inhibitory stop signals were essential for breaking decision deadlocks between two equally attractive nests. If the stop signals were indiscriminate, or absent altogether, the hive remained split, and never converged on a consensus.
Seeley and his team propose that cross-inhibition may be a general strategy for decision making, and indeed, their findings in bees recapitulate features of decision making and pattern formation in other systems. The remarkable unifying theme in all of these systems is how an aggregate swarm intelligence is built from just a few kinds of simple, local interactions between agents. Both neurons and bees are presumably unaware of how their impulses and signals transcend the individual, and lay the substrate for a grander, collective intelligence.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
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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.