Fish schools work a bit like the brain

Sulphur mollies swim in shoals and behave in a similar way to a brain that reacts to external stimuli. Photo: Juliane Lukas The hypothesis that the brain's greatest performance potential lies at the boundary between order and chaos has been demonstrated by researchers from the "Science of Intelligence" Cluster of Excellence at the HU, the TU and the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in a study on a huge school of fish What do the brain and a school of fish have in common? They are both capable of efficient collective information processing, although each unit within them only has access to local information. In the brain, it is the stimuli from 86 billion neurons that form the basis for information processing; in the shoal, it is the decisions of each individual on how to move and interact with neighbors. However, little is known about how biological systems like the brain or a swarm of fish manage to optimally bring together a multitude of individual pieces of information from different locations. There is a hypothesis according to which the best performance of the brain lies at the border between order and chaos, in the state of so-called criticality. Researchers of the Cluster of Excellence "Science of Intelligence" from Humboldt-Universität (HU), the Technical University of Berlin (TU), and the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) have now been able to demonstrate this hypothesis on a large school of fish. The study was published in Nature Physics.