Phaunoscopie #5 : Swarm Intelligences

What if humans were organized like ants? Social insects inspire cognitive science researchers. They wonder how, starting with relatively simple individual behavior, emerge very complex collective behaviors.

This collective intelligence – or swarm intelligence – is formed by relations developed by members of the colony, cockroaches or ants. Positive feedback, signal amplification, negative feedback, signal evaporation … Science is on the trail of pheromones.

Guy Théraulaz is the Research Director in cognitive sciences at the Animal Cognition Research Center in Toulouse, FR. Collective behaviors specialist, he looks at relations between social insects like we would a neural network in a human brain.

By observing animals, science builds models, to be applied to mankind, to better understand or predict human collective behavior…