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How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

bbc.com

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Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#11

Post by pjmlp »

taneq wrote: post #7
babyrainbow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give 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...

> 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.

Like Salarium was once to us. :)

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#12

Post by KineticLensman »

chatwinra wrote: post #10
KineticLensman wrote: post #6

The 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.

Why? 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-te…

The 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]

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#13

Post by padobson »

I 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.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#15

Post by pc86 »

pizza wrote: post #3
midgetjones wrote: post #2

Maybe the real question is 'why can we do so little with our giant brains?'

Maybe 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…

> 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?

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#16

Post by JohnGoGoGo »

"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?

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#17

Post by matheusmoreira »

chatwinra wrote: post #10
KineticLensman wrote: post #6

The 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.

Why? 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-te…

Wires 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.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#18

Post by [deleted] »

JohnGoGoGo wrote: post #16

"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]

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#20

Post by acqq »

pc86 wrote: post #15
pizza wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 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…

> 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?

> 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

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