For this week, we read the first part of Emergence by Steven Johnson. In the book’s intro it discusses an experiment involving slime mold going through a maze and finding food at the end of it. I’d never heard of anything like this from an organism this simple, and found it pretty amazing. It’s actually sort of always impressed me how other animals can do this as well. It’s funny that many of these animals could find food better in a maze than a human most likely could. It seems different organisms have different strengths.
The book also discussed how the slime mold had “coordinated group” behavior. This made me think of how humans can behave in the same way many times. We behave one certain way by ourselves, and may act in a completely different manner when we’re around others. I’ve discussed the “sheep effect” before when talking about people following others across the street. While you may not cross the street before the light turns, for some reason, you’re more likely to cross it if someone else does it first. I also thought about how laughter seems to be part of a group behavior. It seems to be contagious some times. Many times I’ve watched a movie or TV show by myself and not laughed nearly as much as if I’m watching it with a group of laughing friends. It’s interesting how such a small, seemingly unimportant organisms, can be models for us, and teach us so much.
2 comments:
You bring up interesting points that I definitely agree with. Recently I was waiting for a signal to cross a street, and at the last minute some person tried to get across, and two people followed him without realizing they could get hit by a car. Also, I think another good example of a simple organism is a paramecium, which I believe can also find their ways through a maze. The only thing I may disagree with slightly is that while humans exhibit "coordinated group behavior", I do not think we are doing it in the same way as, say a slime mold, since ours is almost always due to or caused by a top-down system.
I learned something on the Discovery Channel a few days ago that makes me think we [as humans] may be controlled by bottom-up behavior more than we know.
The information was that human beings can take in about 500 sensory pieces of data per second, while only CONSCIOUSLY processing between 3 and 5. BUT, our brains still process the unconscious data.
So, maybe we hear a song in the background, don't realize we've heard it, but later on go out and "randomly" buy that CD.
Bottom-up?
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