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In the spring, during the breeding season, the queens of European honey bees leave their nests, and thousands of individuals leave with them, on a journey that you may find very strange, as part of the group remains with the queen to work to protect her from harm during the journey, while the other part makes an important decision about the best A nesting place is available, and what happens at that stage is an event in fact, that calls for contemplation, where one of the group members finds a site, to be an opening in a tree, on top of a house, or whatever, then he returns again to the herd to try to guide the rest to the proposed place Through a special language through dance, yes, it is the Waggle Dance.
dancing bee
Dance is the language of the bees. The duration of the dance, the intensity of the vibration and the angles of the movements are what determine the meanings in that language. Thus, the bees show one of the important characteristics of the language, which is the character of displacement, meaning that we can use the language to communicate about things and meanings that are not present in time or place. If the potential nest is close to the hive, the dance is circular in a clockwise direction, and if it is far away, it is in the form of a number 8. Also, during the dance, if the direction of the bee's body is up during the dance, the new house is in the direction of the sun and vice versa, and for each of the breeds The bees have special dances, but the matter does not stop here. We are now facing a new problem. Let's say, for example, that five scouts have found five suitable places. How can the group choose between these places?
Here a new social behavior appears that we did not imagine its existence, as each of the five scouts works to invite the group to go to the place he discovered through a special dance that determines his location, here this scout convinces a group of bees that his place is the best in a way that is very similar to a political convention We all know it, democracy, so that group goes to the site and comes back again. If a large number of individuals are convinced of the new site, they go to inspect it and return to convince more, and so on until the number of individuals who go to inspect the new place reaches a specified quorum (2), here the controversy stops and the matter is settled That this is the new nest.
Every time we learn about the world of bees we will be really surprised, but researchers from the University of Sheffield (3) British have taken it to a new level, but to understand what this group has come up with, whose research paper was published several days ago in the famous journal Nature (4) Nature), let's go back to our world, the world of humans. Suppose you carry in your hands a plastic bag with two apples that together weigh only half a kilogram, and without seeing we put two additional apples with the same weight for this bag, will you feel that new weight?
Of course, you will feel their weight clearly, but what if we put two additional apples in a bag that you carry, but this time it contains not only half a kilogram of apples, but five kilograms of apples, will you feel the difference added to the bag?
Here you may not feel that addition, and although it is the same addition that weighs half a kilogram in both cases, your awareness of adding it was different each time from the other, here we will ask with amazement: What is happening here?
laws of self
This is called Weber's law (5), or the law of "the differential threshold", and here the differential threshold means the point at which we can distinguish between two influences of the same kind. For example, in the apple game, the two influences are the weight of the apple bag before and after adding the two apples. The law indicates that there is a minimum limit after which we can observe this difference, but it is not an absolute limit, meaning that it is not only (half a kilo of apples) each time, but it is related to the difference between the previous influencer and the new influencer, and it must always be a fixed ratio, The higher the weight of the previous apples in the bag, the more apples needed to be added in order for the bag holder to notice the new addition.
This includes other effects such as the intensity of light or sound, for example, and laws such as the threshold fall within a branch of psychology that we call (6) (Psychophysics), and it includes that set of laws that link our mental state to physical states, for example, Hick-Hayman Law 7 indicates Hyman's Law) indicates that the time a person needs to make a decision increases by increasing the number of options or information available, and we do not mean here only the time that a person takes to compare options, but the time he needs to start responding to their existence in the first place, and this is affected by several factors, age For example, the older a person is, the slower he is to react to stimuli.
This is followed by another law called Piéron's Law (8), which says that the average time required to interact with an stimulus decreases with the increase in the intensity of the stimulus. It has, as well as in the intensity of light, or heat, or even the degree of bitterness of food, and combines those laws, and other psychophysical laws, that it can be formulated in mathematical equations and build experiments to prove their validity by filling in data tables and comparing them with laws, here the research team intervenes to link two worlds with a goal In moving away from each other, the world of bees and the world of humans.
A colony of bees on the heart of one man!
What we know is that those laws that link the stimulus and the response are not exclusive to humans only, but we can see them in a wide range of complexity in living organisms, starting with amoebas, passing through fish, birds and the rest of mammals, but what is new in the matter is the possibility of it being applicable to “an organism” "Superorganism", and by this term we do not mean anything related to Marvel and its films about superheroes led by Captain America, but we only call this term a group of organisms of the same type that interact mutually, meaning that they achieve greater benefit by working together. From the sum of the benefits that come as a result of the single action of each of them separately.
To better understand what we mean when we say “cooperative behavior,” let’s give a simple example. Suppose someone owns a small factory for the production of clothes. Only one worker works in the factory. The factory produces 50 shirts per day. Do you think that adding another worker will raise the factory’s production to become 100 shirts a day?
It is actually possible, but here we ignore the idea that one of the workers can motivate the other to produce, or that competition may push them to work with greater energy, or that the relationship between each of them may develop so that each of them specializes in the manufacture of some part of the shirt in which he excels, while The other one makes another part he's good at, here we can get 125 shirts a day.
This means, then, that a group of individuals could achieve in the aggregate greater results than could be achieved by each of them individually, in complexity sciences (9). We call this the phenomenon of Emergence, and it means the emergence of an emergency or an event on a complex system (Complex System) comes from the effect of the solidarity of the members of that group together, a characteristic that would not have existed if each of them worked separately. We see this characteristic clear in the complex systems of their diversity, whether they are within the worlds of ants or bees, or they are ecosystems, or Economic, or even political.
Let us now return to the bees to clarify what the research team discovered, which is that these psychophysical laws did not apply to the individual bee colony, but to the bee colony as a whole, as a single organism, meaning that this herd, or the colony as a whole, responded as one person, to the influences related to the laws of Weber, Heck, and Perrion, in their selection for the new nest, similarly to the neurons of the human brain, where no individual was explicitly present, show in his simple works the dynamics that determine these psychophysical laws;
Instead it was the group as a whole that displayed such dynamics, just as neurons in our brains interact to determine our responses to stimuli.
who are we?
Thus, this similarity (11) observed in the response to stimuli between the brain and microorganisms, bees here, opens the door for more identification of collective behavior through new research perspectives that combine neuroscience and studies of collective intelligence, and highlighting these comparisons can help us , not only to understand how the worlds of bees work, and thus the worlds of higher social states (Eusociality) in general, such as ants for example, but also can help us understand how our brains work, and the last is a very difficult question, despite our achievements in Biology and medicine, but we don't know clearly how the brain works.
But, in the end, let's not expect too much, of course it takes more research to understand those relationships between the worlds of supernatural beings, for example bees, and our brains, although there are indeed a lot of hypotheses explaining the human brain as a complex system, and trying through computational approaches to explain Its mechanisms of action, and some indicate that consciousness is an emergency characteristic of that system, but this last hypothesis has not yet crossed the barrier of philosophy. Rather, consciousness may be - until now - the biggest mystery in our history as human beings, which, by our comparison standards, is what We know what we don't know, we haven't moved an iota yet to understand it, but in any case, whether we talk about dancing bees, or our complex brain, the nature of things in this world, our nature, always leads us to a lot of contemplation and question: Who are we?