Radiolab - Emergence

Episode Date: August 14, 2007

What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies -- all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. This hour of Radiolab, we ask how this happens.

You're listening to Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. This is Radio Lab. And I am Robert Quilwich. And let's begin today with something deceptively familiar. Fireflies are something that we have all loved as kids, right? Catching them in the backyard, putting them in a jar and watching them glow. So we don't tend to think of them as anything all that mysterious. Well, they do one thing very nicely, which is flash on and off.

That's all fireflies do, flash. But what interests Steve Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, that there are places in the world. Not here, but in Southeast Asia, in Malaysia or Thailand. Where fireflies don't just flash randomly, like we're used to, they somehow flash together. There are enormous congregations of fireflies along riverbanks. How many? It could be tens of thousands.

Tree after tree extending for literally miles along the rivers, all flashing in sync like a Christmas tree. Rows and rows of Christmas trees all wired together going off. and it's one of the most hypnotic and spell-binding spectacles in nature because you have to keep in mind it is absolutely silent. I mean, picture it. There's a riverbank in Thailand in the remote part of the jungle. You're in a canoe slipping down the river. There's no sound of anything, maybe the occasional, you know, exotic jungle bird or something.

And you're looking and you just see whoop, whoop, with thousands of lights on and then off. all in sync. Imagine all the trees as far as you can see are all brilliantly lit and then totally dark. Brilliantly lit, total darkness. All of them in sync. Yeah, and no Westerner had ever seen this site. There was folklore, there was the stories about it, but nobody'd gone in and photographed and captured samples. Well, not until 1965. This was done by John Buck. John Buck, B-U-C-K. One of the great researchers. According to the records, I'm 92. Buck and his wife Elizabeth.

Elizabeth masked Buck. Went to Thailand and captured bags full of male fireflies. You could just reach up and shake the branches and the fireflies would rain down. And brought them back to their hotel room. And we turned off the lights. We turned them loose. And saw that the fireflies flittered around on the walls and ceiling. They flew back and forth.

Flashing randomly. Elizabeth's life. lay on the floor of the room. I was just tired. John stayed awake, and he was the one who saw. Within a few minutes, little groups, duos and trios formed. And after a while... Fourth one would join in.

They got closer and closer together, and then finally they were synchronized. The whole room was blinking in perfect harmony. He was excited the next morning when I told me about it. 20 years later, John Buck is still asking this question. Well, what is going on? Because no one knows. There are literally ten theories. What seems to be clear, says Steve, is there is no one firefly that makes it all happen.

It just happens on its own. Order materializes out of nothing. And that hasn't puzzled. How can order come out of disorder? I mean, this is what the creationists love to talk about. And it's because they don't understand, and neither do we. This is the big, big mystery of science. I think bigger than black holes are bigger than super strings.

I mean, science has had hundreds of years of success since the time of Galileo and Newton from reductionism, from looking at the smallest parts, whether they're genes or atoms, whatever. That's great. We need to understand the individuals. But that's not enough. Obviously, we're not just talking about fireflies anymore. Today on Radio Lab, we will do, as Steve urges, and step away from the individual to find mystery, beauty, and order. in the group. Not fireflies, though, groups of city dwellers, groups of internet surfers, stock traders,

even the group of neurons that are inside your head. This is a science called emergence. So, let's begin. In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. That's the King James Bible. That's how it starts. The ultimate expression of the boss, God, telling everything else what to be, how to be. It's a top-down kind of order. But about midway through, the Bible contains another passage, more of a bottom-up thing. From King Solomon, the wisest of the kings, where he says, look to the ants. Consider her ways and be wise. So we start in California.

All right. Here, Deborah Gordon. At the office of an ant expert. Hi, I'm Deborah Gordon, professor of biology at Stanford. Deborah Gordon has been studying ants for over two decades. It's because such mindless individuals collectively, can do so much that I'm interested in ants. You might say she's the reigning ant queen.

Well, as long as you bring up the raining part, when we went there, I thought, well, she has a lot of ants. But I wanted to see what the lost ant looked like. So she led us to her lab. Going into the secret ant place. Where we found, to our disappointment, that she keeps the ants in a big Tupperware container. This is the foraging area of a colony

that's stuck living in the lab instead of out in the desert. where it would probably rather be. There's a big plastic box with plastic around it and bits of sand on it. That's right. And so I'm going to take off the top. Maybe we can see the queen better by going like this. I've never seen a queen before.

What I'm looking for the queen? What am I looking for just the ant in the center of the biggest crunch of other ants? Well, usually there are a lot of other ants around her. She doesn't look much different, but she's bigger. Do the ants know that she's special? I think the ants know that she's the queen. What does that mean?

The queen in the way we think of the queen. Yeah. I mean that they know her as mommy or not even? I don't think so, no. I don't think they know anybody as anybody. And remember, she's not in charge. She's not telling anybody what to do. Wait a second.

Wait a second. Yeah? This is different than I had actually imagined. I thought that Queens gave command, like, you know, in Alice in Wonderland. Oh, flip their hand. Kind of thing. But she says no. She's just a big aunt that lays the eggs.

That's it. That's it. Every year there's a mating flight, and all of the colonies send out their virgin queens who have wings, and males who also have wings, and they all go to one place, and they gather, and they mate. And the newly-mated queens fly off and start new colonies. That's how it starts.

Queens scatter, make babies. But that's all they do. They're just the colony's ovaries. They don't sit on a throne and decontal. creed anything, nor are there generals or even bosses. The colony somehow gets by without any of that. Which is especially hard to believe

when you watch these ants. Tell us what's happening here. This is... That's an ant carrying a dead ant. Remember there was this one little eddy-bitty ant carrying a big fat, dead ant on her back. And look at this. She seems to be gradually, although with some difficulty,

moving towards my elbow. Then she dropped it, then she picked it up again, then she dropped it, and then up But now she's turning in the other direction all the while carrying this heavy corpse. She may lug it back and forth like that for hours. Sometimes some object will get in there that they can't all carry, and they can spend months tugging it one way and tugging it the other way. Months tugging back and forth on either side of one seed.

It wasn't a seed, it was a little twig. One of them was thinking, this way. And I was thinking, oh, this way. They were going this way, and that's all that's going on. Well, I don't know what they're thinking. Right, I know. I know. I've got a... One of them is pulling one way because the stick feels like something that needs to be pulled, and the other also feels that the stick needs to be pulled, and they just pull.

I must be frustrating watching these mindless exchanges. It is. It can be very frustrating. I don't have very much empathy for ants. They're so, the more you watch ants, the more weird, it seems, the way they never get discouraged. They don't care if they do. do something well. It's very alien. I think she hates them.

Not really, because here's the thing. You can make an argument that ants are the most successful species on the planet. They thrive in places that are too hot for us, too dry for us, even too cold for us. They outnumber us by a factor of many thousand in pure evolutionary math terms. They're winning. Which intrigues her. and also forces her to think about them differently. I think about what the colony is doing,

and then I try to think how it would work. If you do it like that, she says, ants are actually amazing. But you have to ignore the individual. Individually, they're totally incompetent. And keep your focus big. And as colonies, they do great things. It's kind of a constant whiplash.

You zoom in, stupid. Two ants pull a twig, back and forth for months. You zoom out. Smart. I'm impressed that it works at all. That's somewhere between the zooming in and the zooming out, bizarre intelligence appears, almost like a phantom. I think the most intelligent thing I've ever seen harvester ants do

is to build a little turret around the opening of the nest just as the summer monsoons are gathering. And then when it rains and floods, it's raised up so that the water doesn't go in. So when I see the first few ants coming out with their little twigs and I look up in the sky and I see a few clouds in the distance and I realize that there's some link between the change in the barometric pressure or something, and it really is a very tidy and effective little construction. And what else do ants do? Well, let me just count them for you, shall I?

Ants farm. They have livestock. Ants make gardens. Ants organize wars. They have generals and soldiers and things. Take slaves. Nurse young. Ants tunnel involved incredibly good and sophisticated climate controls. They can start from two opposite directions and meet precisely midway. Ants are engineers. Ants orchestrate mass. massive public work projects that puts FDR's New Deal. I'm talking about the Tennessee Valley Authority from your home state.

That's as nothing compared to what ants can do. All of which raises the question at the center of this program, which is, how do so many very stupid creatures with no boss add up to be so smart? The scientist who first really tackled this idea with some success, in the mid-1950s was E.O. Wilson from Harvard University, because he made one of the great discoveries in all the science of communication, certainly. We know that creatures make noises to each other, sometimes touch each other, but he figured out pheromones.

Ferramones are the key to understand the communication of the vast majority of animal species. They didn't know it then. It's a neat story. He told me it a few years back up in 92nd Street-Wye in New York City. One day I set out, I was culturing fire ants then in the laboratory at Harvard. And I said, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. And the way I did it was to dissect these tiny, tiny ants.

Very difficult to do, but I dissected them. And under magnification, I can see that it's sticking out of sting and dragging the sting. Something's coming out of that sting. Kind of like a fountain pan or something? A little bit like that, yeah. So I proceed to, believe me, folks, this is the way science goes. I mean, it really is simple-minded. It's only later when you're doing the technical paper, you know,

and you're producing the mathematical models and that it looks tough. It's really, this is the way you're thinking when you're doing something. So I said, I'm going to find out what the organs are inside this ant. So what I did was to do anatomy. And then, you know, just dissected. I knew approximately what the different glands were and so on. You sniffed off the part where the glands were. You sort of...

Well, you just dissect open. Oh, you opened it. Yeah, an ant. And just the way you would, any animal. Although it's exceedingly difficult when it's about the size of a grain of salt. That's the tough part. But anyway, I took out the various organs, one after the other, and I made a preparation, and I made an artificial trail.

Smeared out one organ after another. No effect. So there are ants over here, and you're drawing lines of guns. of gut stuff, I guess. Basically what it is. Yeah, just different organs. I've washed each one in turn and then smeared it out. And finally, I came to a little finger-shaped organ,

which we didn't know the function of it. It's just a tiny little thing tucked down there, and I smeared that out, and incredible. I didn't have to tell them to follow that trail. They exploded out of the nest running along that thing. I started playing around with us. It was so effective for, demonstrations, I would write my name.

And a column of 100, 200, 200, 300, 100 ants would come pouring out back and forth, and they'd actually write my name an ant. So that was the first clue, smell. Ants may not take orders from above, but they can exchange information. See this one with its abdomen bent under? Yeah.

That one has somehow reacted to us. Strange smells that we're making. Back at Deborah Gordon's life. lab as we watched the colony, one of the ants even stopped what it was doing to smell us. When they wave their antennae in the air, they're looking around because their antennae are their periscopes. Sounds simple enough. Ants follow scent trails, sort of like dogs. But if you stare at them long enough, you will see that when these ants get together, lots of them, these simple sniffing talents they have add up to solve pretty amazing problems.

Here's a forager coming back. What's it in her mouth? It's a seed. Like this. Suppose there are a bunch of forager ants in one part of town and something good to eat in another part of town. Like if there's a picnic, how does the colony get more ants to your picnic? They're blind and virtually brainless.

So how do they do it? That's the question. How do they do it? Hello, ABCD, EFG. With that question in mind, we visited a Princeton biologist Ian Kuzin. This one here. Yeah. He pops open his laptop to show us a beautiful map he's made. So here on the screen you can see the individual paths coded by color.

An ant map. It's as if he gave a few hundred ants a paint brush and then let them wander over a canvas. And the computer has software which tracks the motion of each of these individuals. The resulting picture is vintage Jackson Pollock, lots and lots and lots of layers of squealing lines. So you can put the food down. I mean, here for example, I've got a droplet of sugar water here that the ants love to feed on. Ian points to a splotch of white in the upper right-hand corner, then flips to the next image. jumping forward in time. What I've actually shown with this

is that the ants have begun forming a chemical trail. And you can actually show how they've laid a trail to this good food source. This is the type of image that makes you want to stare at static on your TV screen and look for patterns. It's downright eerie.

One minute, the screen is a mass chaos of squiggles overlapping, no patterns at all. The next, as if by magic, the squiggles have snapped together to form a vein leading directly to the sugar. It happens every time. And what's weirder, says Ian, is every time it happens, it happens by accident.

Error, really. I mean, this is really what we're talking about, is these ants have probably just made a mistake. Error is architecture. Imagine 500 ants are exploring a space. Number 411 finds the sugar completely by accident. Except it's not an accident. Because the Anne has left a scent trail

and there are 500 other ants, so surely one other will come along and make the same mistake. Suddenly you've got two chemical trails on top of each other, doubly hot, attracting a third hand, which makes the trail triply hot, attracting five more,

which makes it octopily hot, and soon what you've got as a blazing pheromone highway of bumper-to-bumper ants. Not unlike Midtown during rush hour. When I first saw the ants in person, one of the first thoughts I had was this looks like a small little city,

Stephen Johnson noticed this connection and wrote about it in a book called Emergence, A Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. A lot of what the ants do is positive feedback groups where they lay down a kind of pheromone chemical signal to recruit other ants to do something that they're working on, and those ants lay down more of the same signals, and so very quickly you can get a whole bunch of ants working on a single problem.

That's a similar effect that you get in the way that city neighborhoods form. Accidents that always happen. That is how ants find food, and he says, how cities find their shape. It gets to what I sometimes call the swerve. Not that kind of swerve. This guide. When you're walking down the sidewalk,

going from point X to point Y, you're going from the subway back to your house, and you pass by completely accidentally point Z, which is a new boutique or a new restaurant, something that catches your eye, and you swerve. You see this thing you've never seen before, and you're like, hey, I want to check that out. The whole business in a sense of sidewalks and thriving urban centers revolves around the idea that somebody coming to see Boutique A is going to be swerving into Boutique B or Boutique C just because they're near each other and because they're kind of window shopping.

What a neat idea. Yeah, right? You wake up thinking, well, here's what I'm going to do in a city. I'm going to walk my daughter to school. I'm going to go to the newsstand and buy a paper. And then on your way, something that you didn't expect, something new catches your eye, begonias. I always want that, and Sally, that's the begonias she wants. Right.

So you swerve, which begins as an accident. But all these kind of local, unplanned decisions all add up into this larger macro unit that does have a distinct personality. And that, crucially, can last for hundreds of years. Which does make you wonder, because the personalities of cities, we know about that. You know, how come there are distinct neighborhoods for rich people? There are neighborhoods in some cities for artists. Slums? Consider 28th Street in Manhattan.

Today, in the flower market, we have hydrant. ranges and sunflowers from Florida. How many flower stores are on this block, would you say? If I had to guess, I'd probably say about 25. There are flower stores all around. It's like a Walmart for flowers in a week. Now, how'd this begin? Let's propose that someone, for some reason,

came here and set up a flower shop, which picked up a few customers. So then a second flower merchant is, hmm, since he's getting the traffic, maybe if I open a store like ahead of his on the block, Maybe I'll be able to pull some people away from him, have him swerve into my store. Location, location, location. And let's say that gets more traffic.

You've got to be where the traffic is. So then you get a third store. And that works too. You could sell pencils that look like ducks and nothing else. And if you're right in the middle of Times Square, you know what? You'll probably make money. That's the key. Traffic is everything.

Once a neighborhood becomes the place for duck-shaped pencils or the place for flowers, what began as an accident then becomes a neighborhood. So much so, if I blindfolded a flower salesman and dropped him on, onto a hundred blocks, would he know which one was 28th Street? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, shit. Yeah, of course. Why? Well, I just down my street, man. I just smell the flower, the highest. Did you smell the highest as soon as you walk in there? I mean, of course.

I would, ah, sounded, the hand trucks, reefers, screaming, yelling, I mean, please. It's a quasi-mystical concept, I really do think. When you think about a neighborhood in a great city, whether it's New York and the West Village or Paris in the Latin Quarter of the Mouret, you know, asks the question. like who created this neighborhood? Who created things we love about this neighborhood? Who creates that kind of life force? And the answer is everybody and nobody at the same time.

So that brings us again to the central mystery of this hour. We're studying here the science of emergence, which asks, where does organization come from? How do you get a neighborhood, a district, or a city? How do you get the complexity of an ant colony if there's no leader and everyone in town is stupid? Steve, Steve Johnson, proposes. that a city is the emergent quality

of this swerve. It's a series of accidents you know is always going to happen. You multiply the swerves and you get a neighborhood. Deborah Gordon is arguing that if you look very closely at the ants and you watch them smelling and you multiply their smells, then you get the complexity of an ant colony.

But buried in the system, both of them say, is a rule, a sense of direction. But how do you see that rule? That's the wrong question. And that's what's so uncomfortable. The instructions aren't any the instructions come out of the way that the colony lives and behaves. That's hard.

It is hard. If you had one ant on its own, you couldn't take it apart and find the substance that would make it behave in a certain way. But you see how hard that is? Yes. I want to know. Where? Where do we find the rule? Yeah.

It's not in any individual ant. You see it when all the ants get together. But where is it? Well, where is the thought in your brain? Is it in a neuron? Does each neuron have a little piece of the thought? If you took your neuron out and lay it on the table, could you see the little tiny bit of the thought that's in that neuron?

No, it's not in the neuron. It's in the way the neurons interact with each other. Think about a Surah painting, the one where they're all on the banks of the Sen River. You know the one? If you look at it up close, all you see is dots. Right. You pull back and the picture emerges with all the ladies in their parasols. But the question with these systems, the big question,

is whether there is a surat to make the dots to paint the picture or if somehow the painting just materializes on its own. Well, you know that I have an opinion about this. You do. It's not a sciencey opinion. I think it's not just fascinating that there are these hidden patterns and hidden rules I think it's just going to change the whole tone.

I think it's kind of holy. And I don't have, there's no scientific evidence because there's no science behind this. It's just an instinct. I think when you look at the way ants work or the way of shirah painting emerges before your eyes, you're looking at an author. See, when you say that,

all the air just gets let out of the balloon for me. It's like, the magic is gone. Really? Yeah, I think so. But see, what you're left with then, And everything that you see when you wake up in the morning as beautiful, and we all agree that it's beautiful, is empty of purpose. Is that okay with you? Yeah.

Huh. In a way, it makes it even more mysterious to be alive. In any case, author or not, there's a really good reason why these systems would not centralize. Put all their eggs into one basket, one supreme being, because if they did, they'd be vulnerable. Case in point, this story from producer, Laura, Doris Tarchesky. I'll walk you over toward the beehives. Not about ants though.

We're sort of in their flight zone, but don't worry. Bees. And we'll just see if we have any luck here. She met up recently with a beekeeper named John Clayton. It's always hit and miss trying to find a queen, that's for sure. She's right there. She's good. Get off me, thank you.

One of the things that beekeepers really like to do is raise their own queens. their own queens. All you need to do is take a frame out of an existing hive that has egg cells on it and a bunch of worker bees and put it in its very own box and they'll realize that they don't have a queen and they'll pull an egg or pull larva and start feeding it the royal jelly, make the peanut shape queen cell. And 16 days later, you got a brand new queen. Well, one time I made a brand new queen, It was my first queen. I was probably 17 years old at the time. And I headed out on my back porch.

And I knew come day three, she goes out to mate. So I'm sitting there, and here, sure enough, comes the queen out the entrance. And she flies off, and she takes off, and I'm watching, and I'm watching the whole mating process take place. And it takes place in flight. She mates in flight with about 10 drones. And the drones die after mating. They come crash into the ground dying. And the queen goes back to the hive.

and, well, she started coming back to the hive, and then I realized I had a piece of sticky fly tape hanging up on the back porch, and she flew right into it, and there's my queen all stuck to the fly tape like this. I said, there's my first queen, and I killed the poor thing, because there was nothing I could do to save it. You know, it's just a horrible story, so it's one of those things you learn from experience, you know, but it was a sad moment because a queen's a special thing. Ouch.

Just got zapped there. Thanks to producer Laura Starch. Keske and beekeeper John Clayton. Coming up, the science of how a trillion leaderless neurons in your head come together in musical fashion to sing the song of the thought you are thinking right now, which, if you're a caffeine addict like me, just might be. Coffee! I'm Chad, I'm a boomerad. Robert Kroblech and I will continue in a moment. Your new assignments are, who's going to be red?

Who's going to be red? Me. Who's going to be round? Hi, this is Steve Strogett. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. End of message. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod, here with Robert Crowich.

Say hello. Thank you. This hour we're trying on a way of looking at the world that has nothing to do with presidents or queens or mayors and everything to do with ants. In science, this is an idea called emergence, how many, many stupid things can add up to something very smart. like a colony or in our case a city. Now, speaking of us, it is often and was often assumed that leaderlessness is a bad thing, a very dangerous thing. This was especially the case in the late 19th century, early 20th, which is our next stop.

It was a time when throughout Europe, hostile, irrational crowds were everywhere in the streets. You really see this enormous backlash, in large part in reaction to the rise of democracy. This is James Sirwiki, author of the book The Wisdom of Crowds, and he's talking about the people on the other end of the riots, the intellectual elite. Look at people like Thomas Carlyle, Gustav Le Bonn, France, Nietzsche, obviously. For all these people, crowds were really the epitome of irrationality and stupidity. But that was about to change.

And he tells this story of a guy named Sir Francis Galton. Yeah, Sir Francis Galton, who is this sort of famous British scientist and is actually most famous because he was the founder of what we now know is eugenics. Oh, is that so? Yeah, he was sort of a notorious elitist. And what's funny is that this is a story about him finding the opposite of his basic assumptions to be true. Story goes, on a nice fall day in 1906, Sir Francis Galton, a guy who truly believed that only the better classes should be allowed to vote, rule, or even have children.

He decides to spend the day in the country. Ladies and gentlemen, step right this way, right this way. At the county fair. Right over it. Now, this is going to be quite an experience to you, young man. The thing that caught Galton's attention that day was a competition involving an ox. Right this way, you might want to avoid that unfortunate plot right there, madam. Pass over it, really. Now, what I want you to do, please, is I want you to examine this very fat ox.

Don't touch it, boy, we don't touch the ox. What we do is we look at the ox and we weigh it in our mind. Yes, in your head. You know, the group was a really diverse crowd. family members, local merchants, most of whom were not experts at all in weighing oxen. Young lady, you know how to weigh a package, don't you? Of course I do. I carry luggage sometimes.

Well, if you can weigh a package, then you can weigh an ox. Here's how you do it. You take, I don't know, a couple of packages and put them in your head. You say, well, this ox seems to be about 70 packages. So multiply the weight of a package by 70. I think they paid six pence and they would, you know, make their guests. And the people that had the best guesses would win prizes. cash prizes.

So quite a few people guess. There's something like 800 people, close to 800. And while none of those 800 or so people guessed the exact weight of the ox, prizes were awarded, people went home. But the ever-inquisitive Sir Francis hung around. After the contest was over, Galtin went up to the organizers. Would you mind tell her there?

He said, can I have the guesses? If I take possession of all 787 ticky. You know, the slips they had written the guesses on. All right, you can have them, I suppose. I don't see anything wrong with that. But why? Because I'm wondering something. Cesar Francis figured these common people wouldn't have a clue. Most of them were overwhelmingly uninformed and unexpert in bovine matters.

And he just assumed that if you added up a lot of uninformed, unexpert individual opinions, you'd get a very uninformed, unexpert group opinion. That's what he was counting on. One of the things he did was he just calculated the average guess. That is the midpoint, the me of all the... guesses. He figured they'd be way off. But when he did that, it turned out that collectively the citizens of Plymouth said the ox weighed...

1,187 pounds. Hmm, 1,187 pounds. 1,187 pounds. Which was astonishingly close. The ox's actual weight was 1,188 pounds. Wow, so they're a pound off? They were basically perfect. My.

and they were actually better than any single individual in the group. Galton was stunned. This went against everything he knew to be true. But you have to give him credit because he did publish the results. He was, you know, curious enough to acknowledge possibilities. This experience that Galton had where he went up to a lot of dumb people and collectively they somehow were smarter as a group than any one of them is an experience that has been experimentally tested over and over and over.

So at liberal arts colleges all over the United States, professors. Why liberal arts colleges? Because that's where these kind of things happen. A science professor. Never happens to vocational schools, just at the liberal arts colleges. All right. I'm being a snob. At schools everywhere, a science professor, a psychology professor, usually puts a bowl of jelly beans in front of the room and says,

how many people here can just guess the number of jelly beans? And over and over and over again, no one in the room gets the exact number. But everyone in the room at the mean comes closest. Somehow, the group is smarter than even the smartest kids in the class. And, according to James Sirwiki, this is not just a history lesson. But that it actually is something you can see at work in a lot of other places and can be used to solve much more complex problems. Much more complex problems.

Well, let's just take one example. The Internet. If you go back and read a lot of the discussion of the Internet from 1916, you know, 95 to 1998, it was totally dominated by people saying, yeah, the internet's neat, but you can never find anything. And nobody says that anymore. I mean, it's just a problem that Google just completely solved. It was an amazing thing. This, if you remember, is Stephen Johnson, author of the book Emergence, and he argues that that exact same mysterious crowd smarts that was present at the Ox Gessing Contest is what allowed

Google to become such a great search engine almost overnight. So what Google decided to do was to solve. the problem of organizing the web in a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. And what Google said was, anytime somebody decides to link to a page, we're going to count that as a vote, as a positive endorsement of the page they're linking to. So this is like a little democracy small D thing. It's a little democracy, exactly. And so what they said is pages that have a lot of people pointing to them are going to

be more highly valued in the Google kind of system or algorithm than pages that nobody points to. So if some guy has a blog, which is really great, and a ton of other people link to him, he gets, in essence, what you're saying, a lot of votes. He wins the election. He wins the votes. And they added a second layer to it, which is that when that guy points to somebody else, his link is more valuable than your average schmose because a lot of people point to him. So he has more kind of Google juice.

When you think about the way that city neighborhoods form, you ask the question, where does city neighborhoods come from? And the answer is, you know, well, everybody and nobody at the same time is kind of creating this. when you search for something on Google and you get a list of results that is often really, really good because Google gives these great results. Ask yourself, who decided that this result here is number one

and this result is number two? Well, the answer is everybody and nobody. It's nobody on staff at Google. You know, Google isn't deciding that this is the premier site if you search for Stephen Johnson and this is the second best site if you search for Stephen Johnson.

Collectively, all the people who are authoring documents on the web have decided that this is the best site by choosing to link or not link. Basically, the intelligence of Google is an emergent property of all these local decisions to link, none of which were made until recently

with the intent of influencing Google. Now, what's happened recently is that people have started to try and trick Google. Yeah, that was my next question to me. You can manipulate this, I imagine. So I actually have this experience. This is one of the most annoying things that's happened to me in the last year.

And it's ironic because it comes out of precisely the thing that I celebrated and championed and have been an advocate for for the last one. five years. I have a website that a lot of people link to, and thus I have a disproportionate power over Google. When I point to something, they will jump up. Really?

Yeah. Have you seen this in practical terms? Oh, absolutely. Well, one way you can tell is that for a stretch of time, if you searched Google for Stephen, I was the number one result. Just Stephen? Of all the Stevens in the world. The Steven Spielbergs, the Stephen Kings, I was the number one Stephen.

And obviously, on some level, Google, is wrong in thinking that I'm the number one Stephen in the world. I mean, I think very highly of myself, but I'm not the most important Stephen in the world. But it's because I have a website that a lot of other bloggers and people in the kind of internet community point to. Well, maybe you are the number one, Stephen. According to Google, I'm no longer, I've dropped to number five or six, which has been a great tragedy in my life. Who's number one now? I think at last, I looked, it was this, I think he's a country music star like Stephen Curtis Chapman. Yeah. I'm still up there, so, you know, it's all right. But, but,

Anyway, so because I have this power with Google on my website, there's an open comment area where anybody can come and post a thought in response to something that I had posted. And about a year ago, people started posting these random kind of nonsense posts that would have a link in it pointing off to some, you know, free Viagra site or to a porn site or to, you know, kind of get a mortgage, you know, cheap site. So it was a coat-tails thing. Like, this guy's good, so I'm going to get on his coat-tails. Exactly. And initially I was like, look, I don't have that. many people coming here that it makes sense to advertise in my comments area. But I finally realized that they weren't trying to attract the people who were hanging out of my site. They were trying

to attract Google. They were talking purely to Google's automated kind of searching. They were saying, look, Google will see this as an endorsement from Stephen Johnson pointing to this free gambling site. See, this is what separates us from the ants right here. Is it we're aware of the colony? Yes, you can step out and play the system. Because people are smart and they have this ability to kind reflect on the system that they're part of, we're able to advance faster. But you also have cheats and spoilers. We'll destroy the system. And I eventually, you know, this, it's this tragic thing that I had to, I had basically to shut down these conversation areas that I had on my site because, because these, I would get literally a hundred of these spam posts in a day. And a lot of

them were really obscene. So it was like, you know, my mother would come to my site and be like, what, you know, what is going on? Stephen Johnson is the author of the book, Emergence, as well as mind-wide open, and he's working on a new one, which will be out soon about how everything that's bad for you is actually good for you. So it is no surprise that he is currently number four Stephen on Google behind Stephen Spielberg, Stephen Soderberg, Stephen King, but ahead of the sky. This is Stephen Curtis Chapman. So, from a crowd, even a pretty dumb crowd, can emerge magically beautiful complexity. And this, after all, was the great insight of Adam Smith, wealth of nations.

No, you're going to have to fill me in. 1776, he wrote a book in which he proposed that there's an invisible hand. When everybody wants to buy something and everybody else wants to sell something, somehow it all comes together in a perfect balance. Speaking of which... My name's Ben Rubin. I'm a sound artist in New York. City, and what you're about to hear is a piece I made called Open Outcry.

We'll hear an excerpt. Sometimes I say to people, didn't you hear me bidding? And I know if they say, I didn't hear you, I know they're not telling me the truth. because people always hear my voice. It's unique and it's a strong voice too. If I'm selling octobers, you know, you don't say, you say, you say, you say, ac and you don't say the full handle. You'll just say, like, arc at 10.

So I'd just yell out. Arc 70 bit. By him, 25. So 25, bids. 5. 8, 8. 6 bid. 7 bit.

7 bit. 7 bit. 7 bit. 9. 25. 25. 25. Peace.

E's 84. Biam. 25. 25. 185. He's not listening to one person at a time, you're hearing everybody speak at the same time. It's like going to a symphony and hearing every piece of the orchestra, but yet hearing the music at the same time. And in the midst of that, you may observe, for instance, a broker that you've traded with for years.

You know what his face looks like when he's laughing. You know what his face looks like when he's upset about something at home. And suddenly he's got a nervous look. You can tell when somebody's bluffing, when somebody's not bluffing. These are all skills that are learned over time. It's really an internal gut feeling. As far as just seeing the expression on somebody's face, the way that somebody's breathing,

the way that somebody's leaning on someone else. I always knew when the guy behind me had a real order because when he had a big, big order, he used to take my shoulder and shove it to the ground trying to hold himself up. These two minutes two. So 50, these are two. Hive 10.

No, me open. No, I'm 50. No, 50. Fees too big. Novi and a half. Nobi, five and a half. Nomi two. Nomi, five and a half.

20 W and two. 20 W and two. 40. 40. 40. Number four. Natural orange juice. Silver.

Orange juice. Cotton. Gasoline. Natural gas. Thanks to sound artist Ben Rubin and the next big thing for letting us borrow that piece. Coming up, the story of the biggest search and possible. discovery since the double helix, and it involves the same guy. I'm Jada-a-Bumrod, Robert Krollwich, and I will continue in a minute.

You're listening to Radio Lab. Keep listening. Okay. Hey, everyone, this is Matt and St. Louis. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod here with Robert Crulwich. This hour, we're looking at the science of emergence, how the world often seems to organize itself into being without an obvious plan or a leader. Well, think about an ant colony or termites, right? I mean, they're trying to build a nest. Mathematician Steve Strogetz. And if you look at any individual termite, it's just moving along and its antennas are wiggling and it's smelling pheromones, and it has no idea what it's doing. It doesn't know it's trying to build a nest. It's just responding to whatever. little chemical is right in front of its nose. And yet, out of this, you see a coordinated group

that looks like it's, you know, everybody knows what they're doing. But in fact, nobody knows what they're doing. And the same thing with your brain. No cell in your 100 billion cells in your brain is having a thought. But together they are. Together they're falling in love or wanting to write music. So who's in there? Do we have any idea why this happens? Or how, I guess? That's the question. And it's a really fascinating question when you really kind of pause to think about it. For example, look, I have here, you see this, there's my cup of coffee. I look at it and, you know, it's a cup of coffee.

But how does my brain know that this is a cup of coffee? It's something that's, in a way, it's hard to even understand what the question is because this comes so naturally to us, right? We just look at something and we have this integrated perception of a cup of coffee. Like, what's the big mystery? I hear you used Oliver's saying. So I had him on the show recently. He would probably be able to talk to you in an interesting way about people for whom this does not come easily.

There is a famous case which was reported in Germany of a woman who had lost motion perception. And there's a very nice description, for example, of her difficulty pouring tea. So that's Oliver. Now this woman, she takes the teapot and she starts to pour and suddenly the image just freezes. She would have stills lasting about 50s. 15 seconds, she would see a glacier, she used that term, a glacier of fluid coming from the teapot. Her brain was seeing something not moving, but then her feet were getting... And then suddenly there was a puddle.

They were getting wet. And indeed crossing a road, it was impossible for this woman in Germany dangerous. And so it's those people who help us realize the miracle of perception, right, that to see the world as a coherent thing is a miracle. Should we hit them at the same time? No. Think of yourself as fireflies and you're all buzzing separate trees. Okay, so back to your miracle of the coffee cup. So yes, for those of us who are healthy, we do this all the time.

The question, however, remains how? I have trillions and trillions of neurons in my head, firing randomly. Every neuron that you're hearing here is doing a little electrical thing. And now the question is, how does this, which seems so, rampantly disorganized, how does it resolve? Coffee into a cup of coffee. How?

Good question. Now, a few years ago, a number of neurologists trying to figure out how the idea of coffee comes to be came upon a kind of musical analogy that a brain creating a thought, creating, say, a cup of coffee, is kind of like a musical event. Neurons in one side of the brain

and another side of the brain are recognized in color or shape or something, and if they vibrate together... At about 40 cycles a second. If they create, say, the same note in step, that synchrony is a cup of coffee. What's happening in the brain is that there's a part of the brain

responsible for the sense of smell. Smell. Smell. The neurons that recognize the coffee aroma are firing vigorously as they smell. Meanwhile, there are colored detectors that happen to notice that it's a, you know, a red mug. Shape detector is part of the visual system that are noticing the edge of the cup. At least what neurologists think is that it's the simultaneous firing of all of those that are looking at red and at sensing the aroma.

It's the coincidence of their firing that's telling them, this is one thing. This is not separate aromas and colors and shapes. This is a coffee mug. They'd be singing together. Coffee. No, no, no, no, one note coming into alignment, one note. So that is a cup of coffee. And to think we do it every morning.

Before we proceed, we should thank the New York City LaGuardia composition class. Our neurons were... My name's Harry Zittle, and I'm Taste. My name is Melanie Charles. Daniel Davido. Sasha Wynn. My name is Jonathan Chu, and I am Smell. Jonathan Chu, Mr. Smell did the arrangements.

Robert Apostle conducted. Now we say, wait a second here, because this is interesting. Robert Apostle, their conductor, told them what to do. But in your head, when you think of a cup of coffee, who's conducting you? And this is where we start getting into the very mystical or even most mysterious part of this, is that who is it that's paying attention? I mean, because, I mean, what is attention? How can you control?

I don't really even know how to. to talk about this, but there's something in you that is... Says at the certain moment, let's do coffee. Yeah, I mean, because it's confusing. What is it that brings one thing into attention and not the other? Anyway, I don't know. I'm a little out of my depth here. Somehow or other, whether we're looking at ants, cities, or the internet, wherever we look, the shape and organization of the world seems to emerge without an obvious

plan. And yet, there it is. And nowhere is this more mysterious and more difficult to really comprehend. end, then in our own hits. Even for scientists who work on it day after day in the lab. Like this guy. Christoph Koch, I'm a professor of neuroscience and engineering

at the California Institute of Technology. Christoph Koch is one of the most celebrated neurologists in the world, and for him and for many others, they have a hard time getting rid of a model deep down, which says somewhere in there there's a conductor. Someone is organizing the action. You may remember there's a movie by Woody Allen called Everything You Always Wanted to Do.

no-about sex, but we're free to ask. And there's this great skit in it where he has a couple is petting in the back of a car. Oh my God, Sidney, can't you wait? You want to do it right here in the parking lot? You see inside the boy's brain. This is mission control. Mission control.

You have this NASA type control room. You have these big TV screen corresponding to the output of the eyes. Brain to eyes. Come in. Eyes to brain. Over. And you have sort of all these white-dress NASA technicians running around. Proceed with erection.

All systems go. And we're going to get an erection in the scene. I said, which one did you do? Yeah, exactly. And then you have all these seamens that line up. They all of these little parachutes. Stand by. A little long tails.

I'm scared. I don't want to go out there. But, I mean, the point is so there's this control room metaphor that we can all laugh about. But a lot of people, including scientists, have implicitly the idea is that me, there's a Christoph who sits inside me. I can tell you, and most people can tell you, it sits exactly between my two eyes, between here and here. And by the way, this, Christoph, I assume, would be saying, okay, she, in this, in the movie, he said, okay, she likes me, let's make the next move. Prepare for launching.

That's exactly what happens, of course, in the Woody Allen movie, exactly. Prepare you and see you guys in the ovary. So the point, says Christoph Koch, is that the Woody Allen model, this idea that there's an inner command center, some conductor directing your brain, that he thinks is wrong. Now, clearly, there is no such person inside my head for a lot. How do you know? Because who is sitting inside the head of this little Christoph? And then who's sitting inside the head of the person sitting inside my head? So you see the problem, if Christoph is thinking about a cup of coffee,

and he gets the idea from an inner Christoph who's thinking about a cup of coffee, where are the inner Christoph get the idea? Maybe from an inner-inner-Kristov? That wouldn't really solve the problem. We'd just push it one back. These are heavy problems. I mean, what happens here is we're tiptoeing up the hill here to the Mount Sinai.

of science. Yeah, coffee cups and people sitting at the controls. Well, these are kind of the smaller questions on the foothills to the bigger one, which is, how does a mind reflect? Why does someone know who an eye is? Why can you contemplate death? What is this consciousness? That's the big one.

If we can figure this out, whatever circuit is responsible for human... Or circuits? Or circuits. It's responsible for human consciousness. Think of what we can do. One day a doctor could walk into a patient's hospital room where the patient is laying comatose and put a helmet on them with a conscious o meter, let's call it, and measure how alive they are. Or maybe even tickle a part of their brain and wake them back up.

This idea, by the way, came from one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century who worked very, very closely with Christopher Koch. I'm talking about a man named Francis Crick. even if you know nothing about science at all, you've probably heard about the discovery of the structure of DNA, the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick. This is that Crick. He was a British guy. He moved to Southern California.

And at some point, he and Christopher Koch met. Now, Koch was much, much younger, decades younger than the older guy. And yet they formed one of the more magical partnerships, a kind of Gilbert and Sullivan or Rogers and Hammerstein of neuroscience. And one of the ideas that Crick had was that there is a way, there must be a way, to figure out what consciousness is all about. They developed this notion.

There's no conscious entity inside my head that serves the role of conductor. That's not to say that there may not be places in the brain that act akin to a conductor, that sort of synchronize and that coordinate the various parts of the brain that fire independently because one of the remarkable phenomena of conscience is, everything is integrated.

When I look at you and you talk, your voice comes out of your mouth. When you move, the emotional I perceive is attached to your head. Now, in the brain, all those things are analyzed in different parts of the brain. So you need some sort of entity that pulls all these different networks

of the brain together. Is there a place in the brain that does that? Well, so Francis Crick and I think so. In fact, this was the subject of his last paper that he worked on literally on the day he died. There's this odd structure in the brain called the claustrum. Claustrum means hidden away.

And it's a small area. It's sort of an elongated sheet-like structure beneath the cerebral cortex. You have two of them, one on the left and one of the right. What's remarkable about it, indeed, this structure receives input from almost every cortical area that seems to be in an ideal position, if you want to go to the metaphor, of synchronizing all the different activities and making sure they're all in some sort of lockstep. So Francis, and you have this idea, He is very sick with cancer and he wants to get this idea down?

Can you describe the scene there? He first had this idea 10 years ago and he talked about it in his book that he published in 94. And then we never thought much more about it. Over the last year, we came back to this, this sort of somewhat obscure structure. So he was very, very interested in it. And, yeah, he felt his, you know, as he felt his illness coming on and getting stronger. He was very adamant about trying to finish up a manuscript.

So he literally worked days and days and days. There's this beautiful photograph of his desk, covered probably four inches deep, just with paper pertaining to the claustrum. And he worked, particular of the last six weeks, day and I to try to finish a manuscript or to get it in a reasonable shape for us to publish. And so he was on the day he died, he was still writing.

A scientist to the bitter end. There's a kind of Mozart's requiem quality to this instance. Yes, yes. Yeah. What was the last thing that you and he said to each other? I'll see you on Thursday or Friday. I was supposed to visit him in the hospital to work on this manuscript. And was the manuscript completed?

No, so I'm currently working on it, editing it and then sending out. I'm about to send it out to friends and colleagues. Because I feel a little bit exactly like the student of Mozart, his name escapes me, who finished his Requiem. He had a student and who finished his recrium. And now music colleges today are deciphering what is actually original Mozart and what was finished in the style of Mozart. And so I'm very much aware of this. So you should put your stuff in italics or something. On the other end, we published 22 or 23 manuscripts together.

And the way we always worked that he wrote the first draft. He was very insistent upon that. Then I would, you know, I edited, and then he added my edits, and so we iterate it. Unfortunately, I can't do this here anymore, so, you know, I just have to edit his draft without the benefit of his feedback. Christoph Koch is a professor of neuroscience and engineering at the California Institute of Technology. His newest book is The Quest for Consciousness. There's more of RadioLab online atrad.org. Communicate with us while you're there.

RadioLab at WNYC.org is the address. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Grubwich and I are signing off. John, somebody's going to have to... Who's going to hold the phone? All right, Laura? The lab is produced by the witch, Robert Kramer, David Marr, Meripel agreed. Goodbye.