Emergence, like all other things that make you go “oooh, what’s that?”, is quite a fun thing to read about. Allow me to tickle your imagination; imagine reading this blog post about emergence (Yes, that’s right).
As your eyes gaze through this sentence, you probably have a lot of questions, doubts, and curiosities. Each of your interesting questions, doubts and curiosities are making one specific neuron fire inside your brain. Let’s call this neuron Susie. Now, imagine Susie is an over-excitable child. She wants to jump and run around, talk to other children, play and so on. The neuronal equivalent of this is Susie sending electrical signals to more neurons (let’s say, Jack and Derry). Jack is fun. Jack likes to play. Jack may send some electrical signals back to Susie and further pass them to Derry. Interestingly, any conversation that happens between them now is technically a network. That was quick right?
Allow me to take a minute to contextualize this seemingly odd example.
According to Jacobson, Kapur, & Reimann (2016), complexity is defined by networks of individual agents that interact with each other, provide feedback and self-organize themselves to eventually produce emergence. Emergence is defined as the process through which the behavior of multiple agents create complex collective behavior without the agents themselves having the properties to create the said behavior.
Simply put, a complex problem is one that is not fully knowable but reasonably predictable, such as trying to understand why traffic occurs (we’ve all been there). One cannot be very accurate in their answer unless they understand that traffic operates on simple rules of operation without any central control. In this context, each individual car (agent), interacts with another car (agent), giving each other feedback (don’t hit me! keep distance!), and end up self-organizing themselves (to produce emergence).
But, how do neurons feature in all of this?! Here’s how:
Chialvo (2010), stated that individual agents in complex systems, are the simple processing elements (neurons) that interact to produce collective self-organized dynamics in the brain, that further lead to higher brain functions such as learning (emergence). There exist a large number of interacting non-linear elements (Susie, Jack, and Derry) that are unexpected and there is an inability to derive such patterns from the individual behavior of agents.
The most fun part is, the chaos created by Susie, Jack and Derry lead to learning! At Oleic, we focus on facilitating emergent learning which we define as informal, inductive, concept-based and, inquiry-based learning.
Why emergent learning? That’s a question for another time!

