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How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains
- midgetjones 10y agoMaybe the real question is 'why can we do so little with our giant brains?'
- pizza 10y agoMaybe something along the lines of "our brains would overheat" - there's a small temperature window in which proteins won't denature, it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle), and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power. Maybe tin foil hats make good heatsinks.. Interestingly enough there is some evidence that the Gibbs free energy of ketone metabolism is more thermodynamically efficient than glucose in the brain (c.f. Dr. Richard Veech's work). You can measure a lower temperature gradient between the tongue temperature and the brain's. *edit: s/Beech/Veech..
- midgetjones 10y agoI was not expecting such a useful and interesting answer. Thanks!
- taneq 10y agoThat's interesting indeed - is there any chance there's a connection between ketone metabolism being more efficient and 'hungry intelligence'? http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section1C.t-1.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section1C.t-1.h...
- Nomentatus 10y agoNote too that digestion is an extremely energy-intensive process, so that means less glucose to the brain (etc.) So much so that humans actually lose energy digesting raw meat.
- pc86 10y ago> it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information...and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power Yet another time when my Political Science education fails me. What should I take away from this?
- acqq 10y ago> What should I take away from this? Just that you should not omit with "..." the most important part of the statement for you. You haven't studied physics. Then you see the formula and the textual name of it with the most probable entry in Wikipedia and then you throw the most useful bit for you away and ask what the formula without the name means, even though the name would give you an explanation. pc86's quote: > it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information...and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power Original: > it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle), and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power. The explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
- pc86 10y agoI assumed there was some relation between k T log 2 joules and 20 Watts, probably giving some sort of context to how easily or not easily information in our brains could be lost. The theoretical principles behind the amount of energy required to erase one bit, while interesting, doesn't necessary matter for that relationship, does it?
- acqq 10y agoThere is a relation but it is not too important in practice, which you'd find if you'd attempt to read what you avoided... twice. The theoretical information change limits are theoretical, in practice, there's always significantly more energy used, so 'pizza didn't even have to mention that limit in this case (although knowing that the limits exists is also important in considering what is possible and what simply is not). The wikipedia article you ignored shows that in the formula T is temperature in Kelvins, i.e. 310 K for a body temperature, and k is of order 1-e28. You get some small energy, log 2 is not relevant for the order of magnitude. Then you need to use time to get just the power in Watts, and which time should you use? Even looking at extreme processes: does killing somebody "erase" all the memory at once? Certainly not, as the processes in the brain are much more complex.... but the destruction of just a pieces of a brain makes it not functioning at all, like all complex systems, etc. And it the end it would be still not much relevant to hang to the formula for any known system, either developed by evolution or by humans. Also once you google the name of the limit you get a lot of articles, not just the one in Wikipedia. Ditto for the brain power usage.
- Xophmeister 10y agoDoesn't that imply that people who live in hotter climates have...how can I put this politely?...a disadvantage when it comes to the stability of their brains? I would assume that the brain has a certain amount of redundancy, but has this ever been researched: How hot can it get before people start getting noticeably "stupider"?
- pavel_lishin 10y agoOur bodies can cool themselves decently well by sweating. I think that if the climate was affecting you to the point where your brain was getting cooked, the symptom would probably be less "slightly dumber" and more "seizures and organ failure". But I'm not a doctor or a scientist, so I could be completely wrong. Hopefully someone more informed will weigh in.
- monocasa 10y agoIt'd make sense that there would be a mechanism for graceful degradation, no?
- pavel_lishin 10y agoI think that sweating profusely and feeling thirsty is the graceful degradation. I don't think there's a way to gracefully degrade from "my brain is a burger patty now".
- kalendae 10y agoWhen diving to 90ft+ you get 'stupider' (nitrogen narcosis). Our instructor had us do simple math problems on a board underwater and timed us. We were doing them very very slowly but you don't feel that it is slower. It was an interesting experience meant to warn you that you won't realize that you are affected by nitrogen narcosis.
- nojvek 10y agoI've been there. It feels so good, you forget things and get unfocused
- adrianN 10y agoBlood seems to be a pretty decent cooling agent. Our muscles can generate a lot more waste heat and we manage to get rid of it.
- cr0sh 10y agoIt's probably not so much the blood as a whole, but rather the water in it (in fact, I would expect the other parts in blood would make the water less efficient for heat carrying capacity - but they also may have other advantages to that end).
- lotyrin 10y agoInteresting to imagine this difference as a species which has evolved distinct specialized circulatory systems for cooling and for oxygenating tissues.
- ajkjk 10y agoThat hardly seems relevant. kT log 2 joules is something like 10^-7 times the energy of an electron. I seriously doubt that that is anything but negligible compared to the other operations brains are performing.
- mickronome 10y agoDid an estimate a couple of years ago that the brains estimated information processinh and the cost of 'erasing' the same amount of information under the assumption that all processed information is lost, it seemed to imply that the cost of forgetting is somewhere in the range 1/1000 of the amount of energy the actual information processing is thought to consume ( approx 8W ) It seems crazy that it can be that close given the miniscule energy information carries, to me those ~8mW is completely mind boggling big. The most reasonable explanation is that my calculation was wrong, but at the time it did not appear to be the case, although it probablys is anyway :)
- babyrainbow 10y agoGive bumblebees radio, tv, reddit, hackernews, facebook and whatsapp. Pretty soon they too will be doing pretty much nothing... Also, give them money and the idea that they will have to amass this stack pile paper before they die, instead of gathering the stupid nectar...
- taneq 10y ago> Also, give them money and the idea that they will have to amass this stack pile paper before they die, instead of gathering the stupid nectar... Are you serious? You can pick up your mobile phone and arrange to have nectar come to you in any amount you require (as long as you have the money to afford it). In fact, to a honeybee, nectar is pretty much exactly analogous to money.
- babyrainbow 10y ago>In fact, to a honeybee, nectar is pretty much exactly analogous to money. Can you or your newborn eat money?
- pjmlp 10y agoLike Salarium was once to us. :)
- tambourine_man 10y agoOr rather, why our digital neurons do so little. Mammal brains do quite a lot IMO.
- redacted 10y agoRead Blindsight by Peter Watts. Apart from being an incredible novel it gets into this question, and it's freely available from the author's site: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm Trying to avoid spoilers here, so ROT13 - Gur nyvraf rapbhagrerq va gur abiry ner abg pbafpvbhf, naq uhzna pbafpvbhfarff vf cerfragrq nf na ribyhgvbanel fvqr rssrpg / zvfgnxr juvpu erdhverf hf gb jnfgr uhtr nzbhagf bs cbjre guvaxvat nobhg guvaxvat, vafgrnq bs whfg guvaxvat. Bhe phygher, oebnqpnfg vagb fcnpr, nccrnef yvxr n QQBF nggnpx bs vafnar vachgf gb gur aba-pbafpvbhf nyvraf orpnhfr bs ubj zhpu rssbeg vg gnxrf gb cnefr guebhtu vg nyy. (The neurological phenomena of blindsight is also very very interesting, and suggests that our brains may do more work than is strictly required)
- joshmarlow 10y agoI really can't communicate how awesome Blindsight is. Have you read the sequel?
- zeroer 10y agoI only made it through one third of the sequel. I thought the quality had taken a dramatic step down and couldn't bring myself to finish it.
- joshmarlow 10y agoThe story-telling wasn't as great, but the ideas he plays with are still good (though admittedly not as great as the first).
- zeroer 10y agoMeh. I thought the ideas were no longer grounded in what's possible in this universe.
- morsch 10y agoTiny ASIC vs large SoC with CPUs and FPGAs?
- k__ 10y agoCan we do so little? I think not. I see a brain like a FPGA or a programming language, it can become anything, but it has to be led in the right direction. Like, some people did Facebook with PHP and some people hacked together one in a million CMS. Some people wrote a OS in C and I wrote a asteroids clone.
- KineticLensman 10y agoThe article mentions lots of different insect skills such as spatial representation, route finding, pattern recognition, predation, etc, and then says that "Neurons act a little like wires, carrying electrical signals from one part of the brain to another. They are a biological version of the circuit board in a computer". After reading the article, I was impressed by the insects, not by the BBC explainers.
- chatwinra 10y agoWhy? That analogy is so widely recognised and accepted that electronic engineers/neuroscientists are experimenting on computer circuit boards to assess the understanding of neuroscience. "It does so by way of neuroscience’s favourite analogy: comparing the brain to a computer. Like brains, computers process information by shuffling electricity around complicated circuits." http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21714978-cautionary-tale-about-promises-modern-brain-science-tests-suggest http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2171497...
- KineticLensman 10y agoThe article essentially says 'insects have very little computers in their heads'. To me at least, this doesn't meaningfully answer the question posed in the title. Furthermore, as per my comment, the BBC article characterizes neurons as 'wires', rather than the very sophisticated low-power processors they in fact are. Wetware implementing/running efficient algorithms honed by millions of years of evolution with (probably) trillions of test cases (all the insects that have ever lived). [Edit: clarity]
- matheusmoreira 10y agoWires conduct signals unconditionally. Neurons may or may not transmit a signal depending on its complex network of inputs and internal state. A better technological analogy for neurons would be a signal processor. Also, neurons interface using chemical messages in the form of many different neurotransmitters. The electrical phenomenon of cellular depolarization might as well be an implementation detail. If anything resembles a wire, it's the axon.
- padobson 10y agoI was hoping there would be something in the article about emergent behavior in colonies of insects. If you think of the bees as a big group of automata, the complexity isn't so much in the individual bee's brain, but in the collective mind of the hive. The research on nematodes, fruit flies and dragonflies - non-colony creatures - seems to contradict this, except none of their behaviors seemed as complex to me as the problem the bees were solving. But that might just be my programmer's brain over-simplifying the seek and flee behaviors I've put into NPCs.
- bartread 10y agoHere's a video of the bumblebee string pulling behaviour to get at the "nectar": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSCr5OxXN1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSCr5OxXN1A. Quite extraordinary.
- nostromo 10y agoIt's interesting that bees can learn new tasks, but this is amazing: > Other bumblebees learned by observing trained demonstrators from a distance. Only a small minority solved the task spontaneously. The experiments suggest that learning a nonnatural task in bumblebees can spread culturally through populations.
- bartread 10y agoI know: mind blown. Amazing communication (and observation) skills. I've certainly developed a newfound respect for the humble bee.
- JohnGoGoGo 10y ago"With just a few hundred or thousand neurons, you can easily recognise perhaps a hundred faces". It makes me think we are missing something when creating arificial neural networks which needs much more neurons to achieve only this specific task. Maybe artificial neurons are too simplified models compared to biological ones, maybe our training process could be much more efficient?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- saosebastiao 10y agoProbably a little bit of both, but definitely a huge amount of the former. Simplistic models of human intelligence being the result of neurons ignore huge amounts of human physiology, such as the fact that we have over 400 recognized types of neurons. Marvin Minsky has a lot of criticism of the overly fantastical fantasies of Neural Networks, and this is one of them.
- cr0sh 10y agoMuch of Minsky's criticisms came before current and modern implementations of neural networks, using extremely large datasets and large GPU processing. I'm not saying his criticisms are invalid - and certainly should not be tossed aside! We are in the very early stages of another "AI Spring" - I have the inkling of an opinion that if we are to advanced further in the GAI direction, it will be by applying these same kinds of large-dataset tools toward other ML models of the past, much like we have done with neural networks - and also seeking to connect and unify these various parts into a whole (I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater - I think all of our past ML systems have validity - it's more of where they fit in the overall scheme that may be lacking). I do know that such approaches have been tried in the past, but I don't think as much consideration of using today's tools on yesterday's models has been approached as strongly, due to all the hype and money (and success!) being poured into neural networks today.
- saosebastiao 10y ago
- richardboegli 10y agoSlightly off-topic but related. BEAM robots created by Mark Tilden who later founded WowWee might be of interest to readers. From Wikipedia[0]: BEAM robotics (from Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics) is a style of robotics that primarily uses simple analogue circuits, such as comparators, instead of a microprocessor in order to produce an unusually simple design. .... BEAM robots may use a set of the analog circuits, mimicking biological neurons, to facilitate the robot's response to its working environment. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics
- hexagonc 10y agoI would also suggest anyone that is interested in BEAM robotics to take a look at Braitenberg Vehicles[1]. These are simple reflex-based robots that can exhibit complex behaviors due to their interaction with their environment. Originally, they were thought experiments by the psychologist Valentino Braitenberg who showed in his book, Vehicles[2], how one might ascribe complex emotional and mental states to a simple automaton if one only observed its external behavior. For a fascinating earlier example of analog robotics, (and the first example of true autonomous robotics to my knowledge) one has the work of Grey Walter and his "tortoise" robots[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=7KkUAT_q_sQC https://books.google.com/books?id=7KkUAT_q_sQC (there appears to be excerpts available for free as pdfs) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter
- joshmarlow 10y agoHighly relevant is the Portia genus of spiders ([0], [1]) and apparently other related jumping spiders ([2]). One of my favorite excerpts from [1]: > Harland says Portia’s eyesight is the place to start. Jumping spiders already have excellent vision and Portia’s is ten times as good, making it sharper than most mammals. However being so small, there is a trade-off in that Portia can only focus its eyes on a tiny spot. It has to build up a picture of the world by scanning almost pixel by pixel across the visual scene. Whatever Portia ends up seeing, the information is accumulated slowly, as if peering through a keyhole, over many minutes. So there might be something a little like visual experience, but nothing like a full and “all at once” experience of a visual field. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider) [1] - http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.html http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.ht... [2] - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160121-jumping-spiders-animals-science/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160121-jumping-sp...
- nickpsecurity 10y agoTheir hunting strategies are awesome: http://portiaspiders.weebly.com/hunting-strategies.html http://portiaspiders.weebly.com/hunting-strategies.html
- pavel_lishin 10y agoPortia spiders are also referenced in Peter Watts' Echopraxia. (Some spoilers could be inferred from thinking about this too hard while reading the novel.)
- joshmarlow 10y agoYep! Watts' novels are how I first heard about Portia. I can't wait for the third in the trilogy. In general, I love a good novel with a bibliography.
- david-given 10y agoFor people who don't believe that spiders can be cute: https://adlayasanimals.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/u2byv.jpg https://adlayasanimals.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/u2byv.jpg Also, I got interested and tried to find some documentation on Portia Labiata after reading Watts' book, and there's very, very little, but what he says appears to be true. They do have telescopic eyes with vibrating retinas. They do spend ages painstakingly scanning a scene before moving. They are absurdly intelligent for insects. I don't know if Watts' suggestion that they timeshare pattern-matching areas of their brains is true, but it seems plausible. Here's a good article: http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.html http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.ht...
- JackFr 10y agoIt's astonishing to me that on the one hand the article upends what had been common sense with experimental results, but then blithely goes on and makes assertions about the nature of cognition based on no other justification than it being the au courant model.
- PublicFace 10y agoHeuristics. Lots of them.
- jly 10y agoEusocial insects like honeybees, some wasps, and ants take this even one step further by combining the extraordinary but limited powers of one individual insect to make highly-complex decisions with the coordinated input from thousands or millions of individuals. It's often stated that after humans, these eusocial insects are the most advanced life form on earth. After studying, for example, the fascinating voting process of how honeybees choose a new home during swarming, I am in full agreement.
- BurningFrog 10y agoBees, ants, and (I think) other hive living insects share ~75% of their DNA with their hive mates. This makes it reasonable to think of the hive as one individual! Just like we are made of individual cells and organs, an ant hill is made up of individual ants. That the parts can move separately is a fairly superficial difference.
- drcross 10y agoI think you mean 100% because ants are clones. The only difference between them and the queen is the nurturing process they go through which influences epigenetics.
- spqr0a1 10y agoWelcome to the complexities of Hymenoptera genetics! Workers are 75% related to each other (sisters) and only 50% related to their mother (the queen). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy#Relatedness_ratios_in_haplodiploidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy#Relatedness_rati...
- Gibbon1 10y agoI remember reading essay on bees and altruism. Standard line is bees are altruistic because workers are 75% related. Author made the claim that's bunkum because a) Honey bees are rather extreme. b) Multiple male fathers. Bee reproductive setups are really diverse with honey bees at one end, solitary bees at the other, and just about anything else between.
- NotThe1Pct 10y agoI cant recall the video (NGeo or BBC) but there was a study they compared brain size in primates with many other variables and the only variable with significant statistical correlation was group size. The big takeaway was that social skills take so much brain power that only big brains can form societies.
- it 10y agoParamecia manage to do quite a lot without any brains at all [1]. They do have microtubules though [2]. [1] https://www.ebiomedia.com/the-biology-classics-paramecium-behavior.html https://www.ebiomedia.com/the-biology-classics-paramecium-be... [2] http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/studies/invertebrates/microtubules.html http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/studies/invertebrates/micr...
- hexagonc 10y agoRead Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems[1] if you want more information on how very complex behavior can emerge from jumping spiders and bees. After reading that book, it seemed to me that AI researchers should focus much more time on duplicating the feats of these simpler animals (in similarly computationally limited contexts) rather than focusing on duplicating extremely high level human faculties like reasoning and even playing Go. I mean, imagine a robot with the intelligence of a parrot or the smartest birds in the corvidae family[2]. I think people would probably be afraid of autonomous robots of this level of intelligence. [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/complex-worlds-simpler-nervous-systems https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/complex-worlds-simpler-nervou... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonian_crow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonian_crow
- thinkling 10y agoI bet the drone industry will do work in that direction.
- sitkack 10y agoCarpenter Ants have a mind and are aware of adult sized predators following them (no harm became the ants).
- allworknoplay 10y agoThe article frames the behaviors it describes as "clever", but they're really not. The bees detect some pollen, get as near as they can, and their brain tells their bodies "try stuff!", and they exhibit some behaviors they typically use to get into small spaces or past objects. A "small minority" of the bees (quote from video of the test) get the pollen when they happen to try the right stuff. They excrete a chemical signaling to the other bees that they did something that worked, and the other bees can gradually copy the behavior. None of this is "clever" -- it's some amazing mechanisms they've selected into, but it's not figuring things out, using logic, or using tools. It's much more akin to a simple learning network playing super mario brothers and dying frequently until it eventually succeeds. It shouldn't surprise us that it only takes a few hundred thousand neurons to do (including a tiny, low-res, colorless visual cortex and olfactory system that maintain a tiny, low-res representation of their surroundings). I'm not dismissing the wonders of nature, just trying to add some detail to a write-up that glosses over _how_ these things are working.