The Collective Mind: How Groups Make Decisions

In 1905, the biologist Edmund Selous marvelled at starlings overhead: “now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net… a madness in the sky”. He wondered whether they might “think collectively”, “a flash out of so many brains”. More than a century later, we are still trying to understand how such collective behaviour emerges. How do animals sense one another, how does information flow through a group, and how can many individuals, each with limited knowledge, appear to act as one? In this lecture, I will explore collective intelligence in swarming locusts, schooling fish, flocking birds and human crowds. Using automated tracking, reconstructions of what animals can see, and immersive “holographic” virtual reality, I will show how simple interactions give rise to coordinated movement, rapid decisions and collective sensing. These principles provide a blueprint for a new generation of technologies, from autonomous vehicles to robot swarms, that can sense, decide and act collectively in a complex and changing world.