The bees are collective beings who have long fascinated us almost as much as we puzzled by his enigmatic behavior. Not only are they great architects, vital for our environment ; They are also the few living beings that create societies, like human beings.
But unlike our societies, the so-called superorganisms of bees are not previously thought by them , but are shaped by the instinct of the bees themselves and their "programming." However, a study recently conducted by the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom proved that bee colonies act in a similar way to the human brain , being synchronized in such a way that they make decisions as a human being would do it intuitively.
Bees, in that superorganism that is their society, have a role like that of the neurons in our gray matter
Surprisingly, this study was not done under the methods of neuroscience, but of psychophysics , a branch of study that has been precisely delegated by neuroscience, but which has been useful to know more about the superorganisms of the animal kingdom .
Psychophysics is responsible for the study of stimuli and how they work in the human brain. Its laws had never been applied to the study of superorganisms , but the director of that research, Andreagiovanni Reina , thought that psychophysics was ideal to approach how the collectivity of bees works; something that neuroscience could not do, because bees are not really neurons, nor are their colonies brains. But, as Reina told Newsweek :
Recently, numerous studies have already shown that a large number of organisms with varying degrees of complexity also obey these laws [of psychophysics].
This is so because the laws of psychophysics apply to the entire brain , and not only to neurons, which makes it a better method than neuroscience for these approaches. The difference lies in the method: psychophysics is based on observation and comparison, and not on sophisticated studies based on technology, such as those in neuroscience, with which we seek to study the functions of the brain.
Therefore, with psychophysics it was observed that bee colonies, when making decisions, act under the same laws as the brain, which are:
PIÉRON'S LAW
Humans make decisions more quickly when they have high quality information. In this way you choose between something that seems better and something potentially worse, of which you do not have much information.
HICK-HYMAN'S LAW
The more options you have, the harder it is to make a decision.
WEBER'S LAW
The less distinction there is between the quality of two options, the more difficult it is to make a decision.
WHY THE BEHAVIOR OF BEES COULD BE APPLIED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
As well as neurons, bees are stimulated by various factors in their environment . Some of them are in charge of going out to investigate the conditions of their environment, to know where their honeycomb will be built. Then they return to the colony to communicate the information they have collected , which in turn is processed throughout the colony. This was studied by researchers in European bee colonies who were deciding where to build their honeycomb and who, as the scientists observed, acted according to the laws of psychophysics .
With these discoveries, Reina, who works as a researcher in collective robotics, hopes to be able to advance in the understanding of the brain and its functioning , which could be useful not only in biological or psychological studies, but even to be applied in the development of artificial intelligence. We only hope that these advances are not used to make droid bees , such as Monsanto, with which it is intended to supplant the bees that are becoming extinct largely because of their fault.
That bees are beings so sophisticated as to teach us about the human brain is another sign that, if nature has limits, we are still very far from understanding them.
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