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AUTHOR “J. Scott Turner (born 11 August 1951) is an American physiologist who has contributed to the theory of collective intelligence through his fieldwork on the South African species of termite Macrotermes michaelseni, suggesting the architectural complexity and sophistication of their mounds as an instance of his theory of the extended organism or superorganism. His theory was reviewed in a range of journals, including Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, the New York Times Book Review, EMBO Reports, and American Scientist.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Scott_Turner View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE highlights a lovely article by Professor J Scott Turner at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry on the superorganism, the mound-building termite of South Africa. These creatures are insect farmers life Leafcutter ants, and cultivate gardens of fungi for food. But they also regulate their hive, which is some two meters underground by means of an external chimney. And this article is about how the worker termites with short lives carry the institutional memory forward that enables them to repair the hives. Enjoy this snapshot of marvelous nature. https://lnkd.in/dj6JZnD View in LinkedIn

ONE HYPOTHESIS. "The successive plant tissues act as repositories of memory of environmental states which, if such information can be conveyed elsewhere, contribute to the whole plant assessment. Evidence for this view is very limited, but plants do abscind their leaves as conditions change and can form new and obviously different leaves in the new conditions." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/1/1.full View in LinkedIn

PARALLEL NETWORKS. "Instead of changing dendrite connections, plants form new networks by creating new tissues, a series of developing brains as it were, that can act like parallel processors each with slightly different computational capabilities." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/1/1.full View in LinkedIn

DEVELOPMENTAL CONNECTIONS. "Just as the process of learning in a brain could be represented as a time series, a set of snapshots of developing brain connections, in plants, each snapshot may possibly be represented by developing plasmodesmatal connections or equally, successive new tissues." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/1/1.full View in LinkedIn