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Essay
Nature 445, 715 (15 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/445715a; Published online 14 February 2007
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Connections Collective minds
Iain Couzin1
- Iain Couzin is in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK.
Abstract
By tapping into social cues, individuals in a group may gain access to higher-order computational capacities that mirror the group's responses to its environment.
In 1905 the field naturalist Edmund Selous, a confirmed Darwinian and meticulous observer of bird behaviour, wrote of his wonderment when observing tens of thousands of starlings coming together to roost: "they circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net...wheeling, rending, darting...a madness in the sky".Throughout his life Selous struggled to explain the remarkable synchrony and coherence of motion during flocking, and he concluded that somehow a connectivity of individual minds and transference of thoughts must underlie such behaviour.
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