Bonnie Bassler Quotes

Just as the mind emerges from the actions of individual neurons and their cooperation, the success of an organization emerges not only from its individual participants, but also from the interplay between them.

The reason that fish form schools, birds form flocks, and bees form swarms is that they are smarter together than they would be apart. They don't take a vote; they don't take a poll: they form a system. They are all interactive and make a decision together in real time.

People's intelligence tends to be in inverse proportion to their number. People don't tend to get smarter as they get into bigger groups.

When people in stadiums do the Wave, it's the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.

Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.

We're dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people - and, now, other machines.

I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

We know that our cells are speaking to each other.

The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.

The thing that excites me, and the thing that excited me about Twitter, is the idea of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight.

What does that suggest when a compound this simple plays such an important role? To me it suggests that nitric oxide is one of the most primitive elements of cellular signaling, that it goes way back into evolution.

Giant group events are distorting organisms: You can like and hate them in rapid succession.

I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

However, we couldn't focus on the films much during the series because we're dumb. Individually we're smart guys, but together we're one big dumb guy, and couldn't concentrate on two things at once.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

Society becomes how we behave.

I've heard people say, 'There are no bad audiences,' but that's just not true. There are people who just shouldn't be together in a room, who produce a really bad audience.