The article explores the phenomenon of emergence, highlighting how complex behaviors arise from simple interactions, such as starlings in murmurations and market price formations. It draws parallels between these natural systems and human interactions, including language evolution. By applying this concept to neuroscience, the author proposes viewing the brain as an interconnected system where collective interactions generate its functions, challenging the traditional localized understanding. This emerging framework is gradually gaining acceptance, suggesting a shift in how we perceive cognitive processes.
Each bird follows simple rules of interaction with its closest neighbors, yet out of these local interactions emerges a complex, coordinated dance that can respond swiftly to predators and environmental changes.
This principle of emergence...appears across nature and human society... market prices emerge from countless individual trading decisions... producing a dynamic system that integrates information from across the globe.
The rich interplay of constituent parts generates properties that defy reductive analysis. This principle of emergence 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.
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