Washington, March 30 (TNS): New research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, studies the behavior of the honey bee colony and finds that it obeys the same laws as the human brain when confronted with stimuli and must make a decision.
New research suggests that in many ways, bees are like neurons. The quantitative study of the ways in which our brains respond to physical stimuli bears the name of psychophysics. Simply put, psychophysics concerns how our brains process sensory information, such as light, sound, and taste, and react to it.
Although psychophysics has been undoubtedly helpful for studying the human brain in the past few centuries, some argue that its relevance is dwindling in the face of modern neuroscience. However, a new study rekindles interest in the field, as researchers from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom turn to the behavior of super organisms to analyze existing psychosocial laws and investigate whether they illuminate aspects of human decision-making.
The researchers led by Andreagiovanni Reina, a research associate in collective robotics at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science are the first to show that honey bees’ behavior may obey the same psychophysical laws as the human brain when it has to discriminate between different sensory inputs and make decisions based on them. The findings may open the door to newer, simpler, and more effective ways to study the human brain.
