The entangled brain

[Celerity]

The brain is much less like a machine than it is like the murmurations of a flock of starlings or an orchestral symphony

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-human-brain-is-like-a-murmuration-of-starlings


Photo by Sarah Mason/Getty Images



When thousands of starlings swoop and swirl in the evening sky, creating patterns called murmurations, no single bird is choreographing this aerial ballet. Each bird follows simple rules of interaction with its closest neighbours, yet out of these local interactions emerges a complex, coordinated dance that can respond swiftly to predators and environmental changes. This same principle of emergence – where sophisticated behaviours arise not from central control but from the interactions themselves – appears across nature and human society.

Consider how market prices emerge from countless individual trading decisions, none of which alone contains the ‘right’ price. Each trader acts on partial information and personal strategies, yet their collective interaction produces a dynamic system that integrates information from across the globe. Human language evolves through a similar process of emergence. No individual or committee decides that ‘LOL’ should enter common usage or that the meaning of ‘cool’ should expand beyond temperature (even in French-speaking countries). Instead, these changes result from millions of daily linguistic interactions, with new patterns of speech bubbling up from the collective behaviour of speakers.

These examples highlight a key characteristic of highly interconnected systems: the rich interplay of constituent parts generates properties that defy reductive analysis. This principle of emergence, evident across seemingly unrelated fields, provides a powerful lens for examining one of our era’s most elusive mysteries: how the brain works.

The core idea of emergence inspired me to develop the concept I call the entangled brain: the need to understand the brain as an interactionally complex system where functions emerge from distributed, overlapping networks of regions rather than being localised to specific areas. Though the framework described here is still a minority view in neuroscience, we’re witnessing a gradual paradigm transition (rather than a revolution), with increasing numbers of researchers acknowledging the limitations of more traditional ways of thinking.

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[cachukis]

1. A microcosm of society?