{"id":7698,"date":"2018-11-27T23:26:02","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T06:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/inside-the-mind-of-a-bee-is-a-hive-of-sensory\/"},"modified":"2018-12-08T17:38:34","modified_gmt":"2018-12-09T00:38:34","slug":"inside-the-mind-of-a-bee-is-a-hive-of-sensory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/inside-the-mind-of-a-bee-is-a-hive-of-sensory\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the mind of a bee is a hive of sensory activity \u2013 Lars Chittka & Catherine Wilson | Aeon Essays"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside the mind of a bee is a hive of sensory activity \u2013 Lars Chittka & Catherine Wilson | Aeon Essays<\/a><\/p>\n

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kenyatta<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Take honeybees, who have a symbolic \u2018language\u2019 by which they can communicate about the precise coordinates of food sources in flowers.<\/b> In this \u2018dance language\u2019, a successful scout bee returning from a good flower patch performs a repetitive sequence of movements in the dark hive on the vertical comb.<\/b> These movements are keenly attended by other bees. The successful forager moves forward in a straight line for a few centimetres. Then she moves in a half circle to the left, back to her starting point, performs another straight run along the path of her first, and then circles to the right. The duration of the straight run tells other bees the distance to the food source (roughly one second of walking distance in the dance corresponds to a one-kilometre flight to the target). The direction of this run relative to gravity encodes the direction relative to the Sun<\/b> \u2013 for example, if the run in the hive is straight up, this tells other bees to fly in the direction of the Sun (whereas \u2018down\u2019 means \u2018fly in the opposite direction of the Sun\u2019).<\/p>\n

This discovery in 1945 earned the Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; in itself, such communication neither indicates nor requires consciousness.<\/b> A decade later, however, one of von Frisch\u2019s students, Martin Lindauer, peered into a beehive during the night and discovered that some bees advertised the locations of various foraging bonanzas they\u2019d discovered the previous day. Before midnight, they \u2018talked about\u2019 locations visited the previous evening \u2013 and in the hours before sunrise, they discussed the locations they\u2019d visited on the morning prior.<\/b><\/p>\n

These bees retrieved their spatial memories entirely out of context, at a time when there was no possibility of foraging and so no immediate need for communication.<\/b> The function is unclear. They might have \u2018just thought\u2019 about these locations spontaneously during the night. Or perhaps the communication is a strategy for consolidating their spatial memory. Scientists have since found that a bee\u2019s memories of the previous day are strengthened when they are exposed to elements of these memories while in deep sleep.<\/b> Perhaps bees not only think and \u2018talk\u2019, but dream?<\/p>\n

The key implication of Lindauer\u2019s discovery is that bees are capable of \u2018offline thinking\u2019 about spatial locations, and of linking these locations to a time of day, in the absence of an external trigger.<\/b> That\u2019s not what should happen if bees\u2019 memories are merely prompted by environmental stimuli, combined with internal triggers such as hunger. Bees, then, appear to have at least one of the principal hallmarks of consciousness: representations of time and space.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

the dreams of bees<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside the mind of a bee is a hive of sensory activity \u2013 Lars Chittka & Catherine Wilson | Aeon Essays kenyatta: Take honeybees, who have a symbolic \u2018language\u2019 by which they can communicate about the precise coordinates of food sources in flowers. In this \u2018dance language\u2019, a successful scout bee returning from a good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[2004,2056],"class_list":["post-7698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","tag-teaching-tumblr","tag-tumblr-exodus","post_format-link"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-20a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52290,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7698\/revisions\/52290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}