Antonio Damasio: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

The study of the evolution of emotions dates back to the 19th century. Charles Darwin famously applied the theory of evolution and natural selection to the study of human communication in his 1872 work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Charles Darwin researched the expression of emotions in an effort to support his theory of evolution. He proposed that much like other traits found in humans and animals, emotions, also, evolved and were adapted over time. His work looked at not only facial expressions in both humans and animals, but attempted to point out parallels between behaviors in animals and in humans. It’s this area of science that author and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has focused on for much of his life. As he has done previously, Antonio Damasio (Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain) explores the process that leads to consciousness. Moreover, as he has also done previously, he alternates between some exquisite passages that represent the best popular science has to offer and some technical verbiage that few will be able to follow. Antonio Damasio draws meaningful distinctions among points on the continuum from brain to mind, consciousness to self, constantly attempting to understand the evolutionary reasons why each arose and attempting to tie each to an underlying physical reality. Antonio Damasio goes to great lengths to explain that many species, such as social insects, have minds, but humans are distinguished by the "autobiographical self," which adds flexibility and creativity, and has led to the development of culture, a "radical novelty" in natural history. Antonio Damasio ends with a speculative chapter on the evolutionary process by which mind developed and then gave rise to self. In the Pleistocene, he suggests, humans developed emotive responses to shapes and sounds that helped lead to the development of the arts.

"The time will come when the issue of human responsibility, in general moral terms as well as on matters of justice and its application, will take into account the evolving science of consciousness."

- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

"Emotions proper are merely an integrated crown jewel of life regulation."

"In a generation that has grown up multitasking, in the digital age, the upper limits of attention in the human brain are being rapidly raised, something that is likely to change certain aspects of consciousness in the not-too-distant future, if it has not done so already. Breaking the glass ceiling of attention has obvious advantages, and the associate abilities generated by multitasking are a terrific advantage; but there may be trade-off costs in terms of learning, memory consolidation, and emotion. We have no idea what these costs may be."

- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

"Which kind of consciousness is primordial? Is the self fundamental for consciousness, as Damasio suggests? Or does awareness come when we take in information without having to do anything about it, and is the attending and planning self merely an elaborate construction on top of that, as the Buddhists or David Hume would argue?"

- Alison Gopnik, Slate.com

In November 2010, Alison Gopnik wrote “How Weird Is Consciousness? Scientists may not even be asking the right questions.” for the Slate.com: Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who has done illuminating research on emotion, decision-making, and our perception of our own bodies. He was also one of the brave early researchers who tackled the problem of consciousness head-on, and he was rewarded by several successful popular books. Unfortunately, in Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio seems to have jumped the shark. The book doesn't include either the new scientific research of the last 10 years or new philosophical clarity—although the style is readable, if a bit high-flown, it's often hard to make out the arguments. Instead, the book is a rather wandering and digressive restatement, with some minor variations, of Damasio's earlier views on consciousness. […] The trouble with Damasio's hypothesis, as with all the hypotheses about capital-C Consciousness, is figuring out how you could test it. There is only one organism that I'm sure is conscious (namely, me), and there are only a few more organisms that tell me they are also conscious (namely, my fellow humans), though I'm pretty sure that my other fellow animals are conscious, too. Just to make things worse, the more you think about it, the less sure you are about the nature of your own consciousness, let alone that of other organisms. The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has collected many examples that shake your belief that you always know about your own experiences. For example, were you conscious a moment ago of the feeling of your feet in your shoes? You are now, of course, but were you before I made you think about it?

"As humans debate the benefits or perils of cultural trends, and of developments such as the “digital revolution,” it may help to be informed about how our flexible brains create consciousness."

- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

Nicholas Carr: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

"Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains" is a magazine article technology author Nicholas Carr. The article—or rather, the essay—was highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition. The essay was published in the July, August 2008 issue of The Atlantic magazine, as a six-page cover story. The essay builds upon Carr's book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (in particular, it builds upon The Big Switch’s last chapter, "iGod". Nicholas Carr’s main argument in The Atlantic essay is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition, i.e. the internet diminishes the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not singling out Google, but is more a critique of the technological utopianism, surrounded by the fervor of the latest and greatest technological fad, be that Web 2.0 technologies, social media, etc. Nicholas Carr builds on these threads further, in his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, published in June 2010.

“You want access to as much information as possible so you can discern what is most relevant and correct. The solution isn’t to limit the information you receive. Ultimately you have to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind.”

- Google co-founder, Sergey Brin; in a 2004 interview with Playboy Magazine

"I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. My brain wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it."

- Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Effects of the Internet and Its Technologies on Reading Behaviors: Nicholas Carr asserts that using the Internet can lead to a lower attention span, and can make it more difficult to read in the traditional sense (that is, read a book at length without mental interruptions). Nicholas Carr says that he and his friends have found it more difficult to concentrate and read whole books, even though they read a great deal when they were younger (that is, when they did not have access to the Internet). Researchers from the University College London have done a 5-year study on Internet habits, and have found that people using websites on a regular basis exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

"It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."

- University College London, School of Life and Medical Sciences

"But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."

- Richard Foreman, March 2005

In June 2010, Jonah Lehrer wrote “Our Cluttered Minds” for The New York Times. While Nicholas Carr tries to ground his argument in the details of modern neuroscience, his most powerful points have nothing do with our plastic cortex. Instead, “The Shallows” is most successful when Nicholas Carr sticks to cultural criticism, as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies. The rise of the written text led to the decline of oral poetry; the invention of movable type wiped out the market for illuminated manuscripts; the television show obliterated the radio play (if hardly radio itself). Similarly, numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books. Carr quotes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” in which stillness allows the reader to “become a book.” The incessant noise of the Internet, Nicholas concludes, has turned the difficult text into an obsolete relic.

"In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us."

- Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

"Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other — sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth. This will be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude. Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book — the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a newspaper."

- French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, 1831, on the proliferation of the burgeoning medium of the day, the newspaper

In September 2010, Steven Poole criticized the Nicholas Carr book, The Shallows: Like the majority of contemporary books, then, The Shallows does not justify its length: its natural form was always that of a pithy provocation, so as an argument for the superiority of book-length prose it is rather self-defeating. Sometimes, however, it does seem as though the author's memory really has been degraded by his internet abuse. "It's possible to think deeply while surfing the net," Carr admits on page 116, thus momentarily torpedoing the determinism on which his jeremiad is predicated, before he gets back on message a mere three pages later, accusing the net of "preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively". Well, both cannot be true. Either you can think deeply when using the internet, or the internet prevents you from doing so. It is easy to see which version is correct; and which version, conversely, makes for a more polemically enticing sales pitch. All too rarely do defenders of books (and, for that matter, newspapers) ask themselves the uncomfortable question: might it be that people are reading fewer of the products not because people are becoming more stupid but because many of the products are not actually very good?

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Nicholas Carr
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive

“The better we get at multitasking, the worse we get at critical thinking”

- Nicholas Carr tells Stephen Colbert

“Shallowness, isn’t that a judgment call?”

- Stephen Colbert asks Nicholas Carr about the wording of the title of his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

"In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life."

- Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

In July 2008, Clay Shirky, digital-media scholar at New York University, wrote “Why Abundance is Good: a Reply to Nick Carr.” Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion. But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream. Much of the current concern about the internet, in fact, is a misdirected complaint about television, which displaced books as the essential medium by the 1970s.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

From Publishers Weekly: Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) delivers a trenchant look into the burgeoning business of positive thinking. A bout with breast cancer puts the author face to face with this new breed of frenetic positive thinking promoted by everyone from scientists to gurus and activists. Chided for her anger and distress by doctors and fellow cancer patients and survivors, Ehrenreich explores the insistence upon optimism as a cultural and national trait, discovering its symbiotic relationship with American capitalism and how poverty, obesity, unemployment and relationship problems are being marketed as obstacles that can be overcome with the right (read: positive) mindset. Building on Max Weber's insights into the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism, Ehrenreich sees the dark roots of positive thinking emerging from 19th-century religious movements. Mary Baker Eddy, William James and Norman Vincent Peale paved the path for today's secular $9.6 billion self-improvement industry and positive psychology institutes. The author concludes by suggesting that the bungled invasion of Iraq and current economic mess may be intricately tied to this reckless national penchant for self-delusion and a lack of anxious vigilance, necessary to societal survival.



From Bookmarks Magazine: No critic completely dismissed Ehrenreich's critique of America's "happiness" culture. But reviewers' enthusiasm for her critique seemed to depend on their assessment of the book's moral urgency. Several critics felt that the message of Bright-Sided was essential to readers in the aftermath of last year's economic meltdown. But others felt that Ehrenreich's ideas, while relevant, had been better expressed by others. They also criticized the author for "cheap shots" and outdated research. For example, she criticizes the book Who Moved My Cheese?, which has long been superseded by other, even sillier titles. But many readers may react like Hanna Rosin, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review that even when she did not agree with Ehrenreich's arguments, she felt less guilty about not sharing in our smiley :-) culture.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Barbara Ehrenreich
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Barbara Ehrenreich (born August 26, 1941, Butte, Montana) is an American feminist, democratic socialist, sociologist and political activist, a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She is a widely read columnist and essayist, and the author of nearly 20 books. Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander to Isabelle Oxley and Ben Alexander. Her father was a copper miner who went on to study at Carnegie Mellon University and who eventually became an executive at the Gillette Corporation. Ehrenreich studied physics at Reed College, graduating in 1963. Her senior thesis was entitled Electrochemical oscillations of the silicon anode. In 1968, she received a Ph.D in cellular biology from Rockefeller University. Citing her interest in social change, she opted for political activism instead of pursuing a scientific career. She met her first husband, John Ehrenreich, during an anti-war activism campaign in New York City. In 1970, her first child, Rosa (now Rosa Brooks), was born. Her second child, Benjamin, was born in 1972. Barbara and John divorced and in 1983 she married Gary Stevenson, a warehouse employee who later became a union organizer. She divorced Stevenson in the early 1990s. From 1991 to 1997, Ehrenreich was a regular columnist for Time magazine.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Barbara Ehrenreich
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> March to Keep Fear Alive

Currently, the author contributes regularly to The Progressive and has also written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms, The New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, Salon.com, and other publications. In 1998, the American Humanist Association named her the Humanist of the Year. In 1998 and 2000, she taught essay writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2004, Ehrenreich wrote a month-long guest column for the New York Times while regular columnist Thomas Friedman was on leave and she was invited to stay on as a columnist. She declined, saying that she preferred to spend her time more on long-term activities, such as book-writing. Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after the release of her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In her article "Welcome to Cancerland," published in the November 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine, she describes her breast cancer experience and debates the medical industry's problems with the issue of breast cancer. In 2006, Ehrenreich founded United Professionals, an organization described as "a nonprofit, non-partisan membership organization for white-collar workers, regardless of profession or employment status. We reach out to all unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed workers — people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could lead to a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control." Ehrenreich is currently an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She also serves on the NORML Board of Directors and The Nation's Editorial Board. In 2000 Ehrenreich endorsed the Presidential campaign of Ralph Nader. In February 2008, Ehrenreich expressed support for Senator Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.

Sherry Turkle: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

In January 2011, Jessica Bennett wrote “The promise of technology is connectedness. But could modern gadgetry be making us lonelier than ever?” for Newsweek Magazine. The advantage to all that gadgetry, of course, is connectedness: email lets us respond on the go, and we are in touch with more people during more hours of the day than at any other time in history. But is it possible we're more lonely than ever, too? That's what MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes in her new book, Alone Together, a fascinating portrait of our changing relationship with technology. The result of nearly 15 years of study (and interviews with hundreds of subjects), Turkle details the ways technology has redefined our perceptions of intimacy and solitude—and warns of the perils of embracing such pseudo-techno relationships in place of lasting emotional connections.

“The reason that I put the robot part first, even though it hasn't really arrived yet, is that with robots, there's this new diction of "alive enough." This generation of kids has something very specific in mind when they say that things are alive enough: "[The robot] is alive enough to be a friend — it's alive enough to do X with me." They're willing to move the whole discussion of what it means to be alive off of the philosophical terrain and onto the pragmatic terrain, where things become alive only for various purposes.”

- Sherry Turkle, author of the book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“People would rather text than talk, because they can control how much time it takes. They can control where it fits in their schedule. When you have the amount of velocity and volume [of communication] that we have in our lives, we have to control our communications very dramatically. So controlling relationships becomes a major theme in digital communication. And that's what sometimes makes us feel alone together — because controlled relationships are not necessarily relationships in which you feel kinship.”

- Sherry Turkle, author of the book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

In January 2011, Meredith Melnick wrote “Is Technology Making Us Lonelier?” for Time Magazine. Digital communication is so pervasive that most of us don't even bother to question its role in society. That's not the case with Sherry Turkle, who has tracked the way we interact with computers and artificial intelligence since the 1970s. Founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, Turkle has written a new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, that asks a simple question: Do digital methods of communication connect us the way interaction in the real world does? In late December, Turkle sat with TIME to discuss robot puppies, teen texting and what "full attention" means in an age of smart phones.

“But many of these same ideas no longer seem abstract or esoteric when you immerse yourself in life on the Internet. For example, the idea that you are constituted by and through language is not an abstract idea if you're confronted with the necessity of creating a character in a MUD. You just have to do it. Your words are your deeds, your words are your body. And you feel these word-deeds and this word-body quite viscerally. Similarly, the idea of multiplicity as a way of thinking about identity is concretized when someone gets an Internet account, is asked to name five "handles" or nicknames for his activities on the system, and finds himself "being" Armani-boy in some online discussions, but Motorcycle-man, Too-serious, Aquinas, and Lipstick in others.”

- Sherry Turkle, author of the book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Johnson--writer, Web guru, and bestselling author of Everything Bad Is Good for You--delivers a sweeping look at innovation spanning nearly the whole of human history. What sparks our great ideas? Johnson breaks down the cultural, biological, and environmental fuel into seven broad "patterns," each packed with diverse, at times almost disjointed anecdotes that Johnson synthesizes into a recipe for success. A section on "slow hunches" captivates, taking readers from the FBI's work on 9/11 to Google's development of Google News. A section on error takes us through a litany of accidental innovations, including the one that eventually led to the invention of the computer. "Being right keeps you in place," Johnson reminds us. "eing wrong forces us to explore." It's eye-opening stuff--although it does require an investment from the reader. But as fans of the author's previous work know, an investment in Johnson pays off, and those who stick with the author as he meanders through an occasional intellectual digression will come away enlightened and entertained, and with something perhaps even more useful--how to recognize the conditions that could spark their own creativity and innovation. Another mind-opening work from the author of Mind Wide Open.





The figure of the lone genius may captivate us, but we intuit that such geniuses’ creations don’t materialize in a vacuum. Johnson supported the intuition in his biography of eighteenth-century scientist Joseph Priestly (The Invention of Air, 2009) and here explores it from different angles using sets of anecdotes from science and art that underscore some social or informational interaction by an inventor or artist. Assuring readers that he is not engaged in “intellectual tourism,” Johnson recurs to the real-world effects of individuals and organizations operating in a fertile information environment. Citing the development of the Internet and its profusion of applications such as Twitter, the author ascribes its success to “exaptation” and “stacked platforms.” By which he means that curious people used extant stuff or ideas to produce a new bricolage and did so because of their immersion in open networks. With his own lively application of stories about Darwin’s theory of atolls, the failure to thwart 9/11, and musician Miles Davis, Johnson connects with readers promoting hunches and serendipity in themselves and their organizations.



Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author. Steven Johnson has graduate degrees from Columbia University in English literature, and as an undergraduate studied semiotics at Brown University, which is a part of its modern culture and media department. Steven Johnson has worked as a columnist for magazines such as Discover Magazine, Slate, and Wired. He co-founded the early webzine Feed Magazine in 1995, and the Webby-award-winning news discussion site Plastic.com in 2001. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is the author of the best selling book, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), which argues that over the last three decades popular culture artifacts (like television dramas and video games) have become increasingly complex and have helped to foster higher-order thinking skills. On March 5, 2009, he appeared on The Colbert Report to promote his new book, The Invention of Air. In 2006, he announced a new online service, Outside.in, which he described as "an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood". Steven Johnson is married and has three sons. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Steven Johnson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> March to Keep Fear Alive

The 99ers from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Dan Ariely, behavioral economist at Duke University and author of The Upside of Irrationality, takes a look at the so-called 99ers -- the segment of the population that has been unemployed for over ninety-nine weeks, at which point their unemployment benefits end. What's next for them?

View the WNYC webpage about this feature story here. Download the podcast for this episode here. See also: Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, A Taste of Irrationality: Sample chapters from Predictably Irrational and Upside of Irrationality, The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change. Below is a YouTube video of the author's talk at Google.

New Horizons: David Freedman from New Horizons in Education

Bob Kustra interviews David Freedman about his book, "Wrong" about why experts get it wrong and how to discern when their advice is off target.

Download the New Horizons podcast here. Last month, The Atlantic published an article by Freedman called, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science." In the article, he describes biostatistician's presentation that asked: "were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good?" This is the way that the protagonist of Freedman's story is introduced, Dr. John Ioannidis; "Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science." The article's definitely worth the time; find it here. See also, this New Yorker article, by Jonah Lehrer. The article's called, "The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method?" Find that New Yorker article here.

Oliver Sacks Discusses Vision and 'The Mind's Eye' from NPR Podcast Science Friday

Normally the eyes and brain work together in a seamless, intricate system. But what happens when the brain can no longer make sense of visual information? Neurologist Oliver Sacks talks about his new book, The Mind's Eye, and what visual disorders reveal about how the brain processes sight.

Download the podcast here. See also: The Mind's Eye, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition, Migraine

Oliver Sacks Discusses Vision and 'The Mind's Eye' from NPR: Science Friday Podcast

Normally the eyes and brain work together in a seamless, intricate system. But what happens when the brain can no longer make sense of visual information? Neurologist Oliver Sacks talks about his new book, The Mind's Eye, and what visual disorders reveal about how the brain processes sight.

View the webpage for this particular Science Friday show, here. See also: The Mind's Eye, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition, Migraine

The Intelligence Of Crowds In 'The Perfect Swarm' from NPR: Science Friday Podcast

In his book The Perfect Swarm, Len Fisher talks about swarm intelligence -- where the collective ideas of a group add up to better solutions than any individual could have dreamed up, including an example of how UPS reorganized its driving routes using the logic of an ant colony.

Download the NPR Science Friday podcast here. Scientific American had this to say about the book:

Next time you get annoyed when you discover an army of ants marching through your kitchen pantry, think about this: these tiny insects could teach you how to make better decisions in your social, private and professional life. Sounds crazy? Not according to scientist and journalist Len Fisher. In his new book, The Perfect Swarm, he introduces us to the modern science of complexity—how intricate patterns grow out of simple rules. Research shows that such rules underlie the group behaviors of animals, such as bees and locusts, and Fisher explains how we can learn a thing or two from these basic laws. At the heart of the book lies swarm intelligence, a phenomenon that results when large groups of individuals—be they robots or guppies—behave in the same way, and their collective actions (presumably unbeknownst to the individuals) become intelligent. Ant colonies provide a good example, Fisher says. In search of food, individual ants initially roam an area at random. Yet those animals that happen to be on the fastest route to a food source will return to the nest first. The pheromones they lay down on their trail then allow other ants to use that same route. By the time the remaining pioneers return to the nest, more animals will have already laid down more pheromones on the fastest route, which quickly becomes the predominant one.

See also: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, The Essence Of Chaos (The Jessie and John Danz Lecture Series), Chaos: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions), Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: With Applications To Physics, Biology, Chemistry, And Engineering (Studies in Nonlinearity)