Ants and Neurons: Emergent Decision Making

This is a fascinating article about the emergent decision making of ant (and bee) colonies and how this can shed light on the decision making of neurons in the brain.

The efficiency of a social insect democracy is largely a product of the simplicity of its constituents. "Human groups have factions with conflicting agendas, whereas social insects in a colony have much less self-interest and genuinely 'want' to converge on the best option," Marshall says. Still, Seeley believes that there is much to be learned about decision making from honeybees. "I have learned several things from the bees that I have employed as department chair," he says. Seeley cites a number of what he terms "swarm smarts," such as the honeybee’s ability to avoid groupthink by having each "voter" assess options independently. Furthermore, when disaster strikes, the honeybees adapt their decision making by lowering their threshold levels and deliberation time. While we, as individuals, do this constantly (rushing to meet deadlines, ordering quickly in a crowded deli instead of weighing our options), our democracy can be slow and ungainly, endlessly logjammed over issues of immediate need.

The similarities between ants and neurons "suggest there are general principles of organization for building groups far smarter than the smartest individuals in them," Seeley says. Group decision making is occurring constantly at different levels of complexity and across different scales of space and time; understanding how it works in one context can inform our understanding of other systems that might be more complicated or difficult to explore. By looking at decision making in all of its diverse incarnations, we can step outside of standard modes of reasoning and find new ways to talk about complexity in our ecosystems, our communities, our governments, and our minds.