Oscillations naturally emerge in large crowds. That's because your brain works by oscillating. Emergence of collective oscillations in massive human crowds www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience - ThreadSky

earlkmiller.bsky.social • 18 days ago

Oscillations naturally emerge in large crowds. That's because your brain works by oscillating.
Emergence of collective oscillations in massive human crowds
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08514-6
#neuroscience

Comments

ithacagreg.bsky.social•17 days ago

Love this example. And you likely wouldn’t need much of a brain to be part of this.

arun-niranjan.bsky.social•17 days ago

Surely the frequency of these oscillations are different by many orders of magnitude?

earlkmiller.bsky.social•17 days ago

It's called harmony

adw.bsky.social•18 days ago

That’s not really true. The behavioural scale oscillations aren’t simply the result of neural scale oscillations

tuomaspernu.bsky.social•18 days ago

That sounds weird to me too. (But I might buy the claim that the oscillations are similar, just not causally connected.)

earlkmiller.bsky.social•18 days ago

Doesn't sound weird to me. Oscillations emerge from complex systems. Your brain is oscillating. Behavior comes from the brain. Evolution uses what is available.

adw.bsky.social•18 days ago

But it has more than brain dynamics available; it has perceptual information, limb dynamics, etc

earlkmiller.bsky.social•18 days ago

And that all feeds into and is shaped by brain dynamics. It's a two-street. It has to be. Because of the laws of physics.

willjharrison.bsky.social•18 days ago

"The crowds oscillate because any dataset can be expressed in terms of oscillations."

earlkmiller.bsky.social•18 days ago

I missing your logic. What makes you so sure? Your brain is oscillating. Doesn't behavior emerge from the brain?

chazfirestone.bsky.social•18 days ago

yes and that’s why crowds are gray, weigh 3lbs, show bilateral symmetry & communicate by shooting chemicals into gaps between crowd members.

(just messing around but why think properties of crowds mirror properties of brains?? crowds are made of quarks too; doesn’t mean crowds behave like quarks…)

earlkmiller.bsky.social•17 days ago

Not too long ago oscillating electric fields in the brain were viewed as just the engine humming. But everywhere we look we see oscillatory dynamics. Even "sustained" attention waxes and wanes at 4-8 Hz. That's the point. Whenever someone says "epiphenomenon". I hear "doesn't fit my theory.

robwoodry.bsky.social•17 days ago

Oscillations are metabolically costly. At some point they may have been “epiphenomena”, but evolution would favor systems that take advantage of it

However, complex crowd behavior can emerge from simpler mechanics, like swarm dynamics. Ie never let your neighbor get too far or too close to you

robwoodry.bsky.social•17 days ago

If anything, I would guess brain oscillations play a minor role in these crowd oscillations

Ofc if there were no brain oscillations, we’d have a dead crowd. And a dead crowd wouldn’t have such itneresting behavior

earlkmiller.bsky.social•17 days ago

When someone says "epiphenomenon", I hear "doesn't fit my theory". Where's the logic? Spikes are metabolically expensive. I don't hear any suggestion that that are or were once an epiphenomenon.

adw.bsky.social•18 days ago

“Behaviour looks like what the brain is saying” is a pretty standard view, it’s just wrong :) This is less about quarks and more about what roles parts play in cognitive systems

earlkmiller.bsky.social•17 days ago

Communication and computation via oscillating electric fields are emerging models, most certainly NOT the standard view, which is all about weights of connections. A glance at social media debates and literature confirms this. And BTW, those parts are oscillating.

adw.bsky.social•17 days ago

I’m with you in that - and I’m definitely on board with oscillations and waves being interesting! I’m just convinced *brains* aren’t the sole source of behaviour, despite cognitive orthodoxy here :)

nmwilkinson.bsky.social•18 days ago

What would it mean for a collective behaviour to emerge from the brain? I'm guessing you could get similar crowd oscillations in a kuramoto-style model without brains/high-complexity-elements. Individuals in a crowd are participants in larger scale jostle and crowd dynamics not inside their brains

adw.bsky.social•18 days ago

No :)

Brains are obviously part of it, but behaviour is an accomplishment of the organism in it’s environment. And the causation is loopy too - part of why brains do what they do is because of what the organism is perceiving and acting, not just the other way round

earlkmiller.bsky.social•18 days ago

Wrong. Yes. Both ways around. It has to be a 2-way street. It's basic physics.

markhaselgrove.bsky.social•18 days ago

It is well known that local field potentials were measured from all attendees of these festivals 😉.

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