Bees do a quantum dance in order to tell the other members of their hive where to find the honey. Now scientists have discovered that warms of bees and brains, which are made up of neurons, both make decisions in the same way.
Neurologist Thomas Seeley figured out how scout bees in a honeybee swarm perform "waggle dances" to tell other scout bees to inspect a promising site that has been found. Now he’s discovered that scout bees also use inhibitory “stop signals”–a short buzz delivered with a head butt to the dancer– to inhibit the waggle dances produced by scouts advertising competing sites. In other words, they "break dance" to see whose site wins, since only one site is chosen at a time.
Seely says that such use of stop signals in decision making is “analogous to how the nervous system works in complex brains. The brain has similar cross inhibitory signaling between neurons in decision-making circuits.” In other words, the entire hive sometimes functions the same way a single brain does, producing a "hive mentality."
This means that–in the future– if insects eventually evolve to displace humans, it will be a very different world!
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