Orientation by Internal Map. Column in KomputerraOnline #65

← Dmitry Shabanov → A Holistic Model of Being Orientation by Internal Map The Fate of Growth Points in a System of Decorative Education Column in KomputerraOnline #64 Column in KomputerraOnline #65 Column in KomputerraOnline #66 In the previous column I argued that the key stages of human development can be viewed through the prism of the evolution of reality models constructed by the psyche. I mentioned that the formation of such models served to govern locomotion. I wish to discuss these models in greater detail and shall turn, for this purpose, to the language of social insects. The language of bees has been the subject of intensive study since the time of Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch, his successor Martin Lindauer, and many other brilliant researchers. One of the discoveries of this scientific school was the description of the waggle dance of bees. A scout bee, having discovered a food source at some distance from the hive, performs a specific dance in the darkness of the hive on vertically arranged combs. She runs in a figure-of-eight pattern. The frequency of the waggling movements of the abdomen is a measure of the distance to the food source, while the angle of the central portion of the figure-of-eight relative to the vertical corresponds to the angle of the required flight direction relative to the projection of the solar direction onto the earth's surface. Unclear? The following illustration (adapted from this source) should clarify matters. [IMG_1] When a scout bee dances on a horizontal surface (for example, on the landing board), the central portion of the figure she traces indicates the direction of flight toward the goal. When the dance is performed on the comb surface, the deviation of the central portion of the traced figure from the vertical indicates the angle between the direction of flight and the direction toward the sun. Frisch maintained that the scout bee precisely communicates the required flight direction to other worker bees. A series of subsequent experiments demonstrated that the majority of "listeners" orient not by the geometric signals but simply by the odour of the food. It appears, however, that approximately 10 percent of dance observers fly precisely to the correct destination. This might be taken as evidence of the inefficiency of the bee language. Yet, as an experienced teacher, I can assure readers: 10 percent of listeners who have genuinely understood a complex explanation is a perfectly respectable result for a human educator. Debates surrounding bee dances continue, but it seems that no one disputes the fact of their existence. The figures traced by the scout bee during the dance reflect the representation of the goal held in her supraoesophageal ganglion (which, in Frisch's words, is "smaller than a millet grain"). It appears, nonetheless, that certain observers — both neighbouring hive bees and biologist researchers — do decode these dances correctly. Why do bees use the position of the sun as their primary reference point? The compound eye of insects is capable of perceiving the plane of polarisation of light, and a bee can readily calculate the position of the sun even when it is obscured behind dense cloud cover. However, solar orientation has one significant drawback: the solar disc is in constant motion across the sky. Bees are sometimes required to fly considerable distances in search of forage. During such a flight, the sun shifts substantially across the sky. What is to be done? Recalculate directions and angles! Evidently, this is possible only with the presence of an internal clock. Providing such a sophisticated orientation mechanism is no simple task. It requires efficient processing of data related to the passage of time and position in space. Bees are an ancient group, and their orientation mechanism is the product of tens of millions of years of evolution. Its emergence was justified by the fact that employing such a flight-control mechanism greatly increases foraging efficiency. By analysing bee behaviour, we can learn something about how they operate with a model of space. I shall describe an experiment that exploits bees' aversion to flying over tall obstacles. Bees were made to fly toward a goal situated behind a tall building. The possible routes are shown in the figure. [IMG_2] The goal toward which the bees are flying is located behind an obstacle. Which of the routes marked 1, 2, 3, and 4 do you think they choose? The first conclusion that can be drawn from the results of this experiment is that scout bees do not communicate which side of the obstacle to circumnavigate. Upon reaching the wall of the building, the nectar-foragers turn whichever way they happen to — left or right. They reach the edge of the building and... The scout's dance that set them on their course encoded the direction to the goal and the straight-line distance to it. Do the foragers return to the line from which they had deviated? No. They choose route variants 1 or 4 and fly directly toward the goal (with some error, a consequence of imperfections in information transmission and field orientation). The scout who directed them toward the food had covered a greater distance than the straight-line distance from the hive to the goal, yet she indicated precisely the straight-line distance in her dance. The foragers established where the goal is located on the internal map and thereafter, deviating from the direct route owing to uncharted obstacles, fly toward it by the shortest available path. Note the triangle shown in grey: in their calculations, bees apply the rule we know as the Pythagorean theorem. We do not know how the spatial model is organised in the bee's psyche, but it possesses the properties of an internal map... And now — the final, in my view decisive, detail. Bees collect nectar only during daylight hours, and they dance during daylight as well. Throughout the daylight hours, in our northern hemisphere, the sun traces a path from east, through the southern quarter of the sky, to the west. In the northern hemisphere, the sun never appears in the northern sky. At night it passes on the other side of the Earth, beneath our feet — from west, through the northern quarter, to the east. But will bees understand where the sun is at night? Methods have been found to induce them to dance at night. One involves directing into the hive a bee that is excited by the discovery of a new food source, and then restraining her on the comb under a close-fitting wire mesh. Another method is associated with the situation of searching for a new refuge for a swarm preparing to depart. Where, from the perspective of the bee language, is the sun located at night? In the north! From our perspective, correctly calculating the position of the celestial body requires understanding the logic of the Earth's daily rotation. When did humanity arrive at a correct understanding of this fact? Bees began using this knowledge in implicit form long before. The presence in the bee's psyche of a reflection of the Earth's daily rotation may seem miraculous. How could an internal model, which developed for adaptive purposes, come to correspond with astronomical reality? I have no definitive answer to this question, but I surmise that the most efficient explanation of the sun's movement is the most mathematically simple and parsimonious one. Our world, too, is organised parsimoniously. The most adaptive model proved to be the one whose logic coincided with the actual structure of the physical world. Do readers experience a certain cognitive dissonance? Did it formerly seem to you that the symbolic description of reality was the prerogative of human beings? Then allow me to deliver the coup de grâce with an account of the peculiarities of ant language. Ant communication has been studied less thoroughly than that of bees. Fortunately, with a well-designed experimental setup, it is possible to learn something about the model of reality of these hymenopterans as well. Consider the description of experiments conducted by Zhanna Reznikova and Boris Ryabko, who study ant communication in Siberia. An artificial nest. A wooden comb with several dozen teeth. To move from one tooth to another, one must pass through the base of the comb. A scout is shown food placed on one of the teeth. It runs back to the nest for assistance and "explains" something to its nestmates. While the information is being transmitted, the comb is replaced with an identical one, free of the olfactory marks left by the ant. After a certain time — the time required for information transmission — a team emerges from the nest. At this point the scout is removed from the nest with tweezers so that it cannot show the way. This does not prevent the emerging team from heading directly to the correct tooth. The food is placed on the tooth only after the choice has been made (so that the ants orient by the received information rather than, for example, by the odour of the food). The only possible means of orientation is the number of the tooth. Remarkably, under these conditions, ants communicate to one another where to search for food! [IMG_3] Ants have found the goal — a drop of nectar (photograph from the cited review) And that is not all. The higher the tooth number, the longer the information transfer takes. Roughly speaking, to convey that the food is on the sixtieth tooth, one must "say" something like "pass this tooth and proceed to the next" fifty-nine times. Such an explanation requires considerably more time than describing the path to the second tooth. Understood so far? Then the ants were trained to find food more frequently on certain teeth (identified only by number — no marks whatsoever). Subsequently the bait was moved to teeth adjacent to the familiar ones — and a reduction in the time required for information transfer was recorded. It follows that ants do not describe the path from start to finish but instead transmit something resembling the command "two teeth before such-and-such of the recent locations." Thus, in their communication system, generally understood designations have emerged for those teeth where food appeared with relative frequency. Note the elegance of these experiments. We do not know how ant language is structured, but from the time of information transfer alone it is possible to ascertain something essential about the principles of its functioning. And through this we obtain evidence that the spatial model used by ants employs symbols and proves to be plastic — correctable during use! Evidently, a language modifiable in accordance with the situation proved more efficient than a rigidly hardwired, genetically predetermined fixed schema. Are you not yet ready to revise your attitude toward insects? Thus, in describing the models of reality characteristic of social hymenopterans (bees and ants), we have identified several of their shared properties. They are designed to govern locomotion. They are adaptive. They are organised parsimoniously. They employ symbols. And one thing more: they are astonishingly sophisticated. Returning to the previous column, I shall note that we do not know whether bees and ants perceive the world around them as a continuous and integral process or as an aggregate of discrete stimuli. Yet there is much in common between their inner world and ours. And we were able to discover this because the models in the psyche of these insects manifest themselves in the course of their interactions with one another. Is it not in precisely the same way that we judge the inner world of human beings? Incidentally, working with space also played a particular role in the formation of our own models, sustained through human interaction. Science as a body of propositions successively derived from initial principles and verifiable observations grew from Euclid's Elements, and the Elements themselves summed up the accumulated experience of working with space. By no means do I wish to diminish the role of Euclid's predecessors — nor how could one diminish the role of Aristotle, the "father of all sciences"? And yet it was Euclid who created the first (at least the first surviving) comprehensive deductive system. Thus, there is something in common between the development of the individual models of social insects and our collective model of reality — science. What features, then, are unique to our own inner models of reality? No, I am not speaking of the uniqueness of our relations with the environment, which I discussed in the series of "coffee" columns (this one and the five that followed it) a year ago. At that time, a year ago, I deliberately refrained from discussing the features of the inner world of different creatures. But since we can make judgements about the operation of ant models, we can also reflect upon the operation of our own models. And what features of such models constitute our exclusive prerogative? That — is for another time. ← Dmitry Shabanov → A Holistic Model of Being Orientation by Internal Map The Fate of Growth Points in a System of Decorative Education Column in KomputerraOnline #64 Column in KomputerraOnline #65 Column in KomputerraOnline #66