Why the Bee is Like the Brain

The existential question for the honeybee is simple. The meaning of life is to have a home. A hive. But, as with you and me, it does require a choice. How do 10,000 bees make a choice? How do the 100 billion neurons in your brain make a choice?

With the bees, at least, we can watch. Here is a report by Thomas Seeley and his group. . (May-June issue of American Scientist,)

A honeybee swarm bivouacs on a tree branch, waiting for scout bees to select candidate sites for a new home, deliberate among the choices and then reach a verdict -- a process "complicated enough to rival the dealings of any department committee," says Cornell biologist Thomas Seeley. …

Scientists had known that honeybee scouts "waggle dance" to report on food. Seeley and his colleagues, however, have confirmed that they dance to report on real estate, too, as part of their group decision-making process.

The better the housing site, the stronger the waggle dance, the researchers found, and that prompts other scouts to visit a recommended site. If they agree it's a good choice, they also dance to advertise the site and revisit it frequently. Scouts committed to different sites compete to attract uncommitted scouts to their sites, the researchers have discovered, but because the bees grade their recruitment signals in relation to site quality, the scouts build up most rapidly at the best site.

As soon as 15 or more bees are advocating one site, the process of swarming to the new site begins. "The bees' method, which is a product of disagreement and contest rather than consensus or compromise, consistently yields excellent collective decisions," said Seeley

Your neurons don’t do a waggle dance. Instead, they send out more signals or coordinated signals. That gets them more attention and more connections. The strategy is similar to the pandemonium model described by Selfridge many years ago (http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/pandemonium.html).