Liberal arts universities are often associated with niche and quirky classes that are made available to underclassmen as an introduction to multiple disciplines. Colgate University embraces this tradition via its Core Curriculum, which includes Core Sciences, Core Communities and Core Conversations — courses in which students foster creative problem-solving and critical thinking skills which transcend academic subjects.
Hive Mind is a new Core Science class available to first-year and sophomore students looking to study biological communication, with a special focus on collective intelligence strategies employed by bees and ants. By examining the bee brain and its sensory mechanisms, students are exposed to the world of “superorganisms” — a concept with implications for human cults and AI design.
Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences Anzela Niraula is teaching Hive Mind this fall and engages in these complex concepts.
“The concept of a superorganism spans disciplines,” Niraula said.“People talk about a superorganism in the context of cells, like embryology, for instance, when cells are organizing and differentiating. If you dig in and try to figure out what cells are doing individually, you wouldn’t know. But when you zoom out to the collection, you can see planning and organization.”
Although Niraula’s academic background is in neuroimmunology, both she and her students have found intrigue in an unlikely place: the brains of bees and ants.
“My research training is in the bidirectional communication between the brain and immune system. It is a form of communication: biology is all communication,” Niraula said. “[Animal behavior] is something that I’ve always been very fascinated with, for example how social animals make collective decisions. I thought this would be a really fun way to learn about the thing that I find fascinating.”
For students of Hive Mind like sophomores Saif Al-Hashimi and Pistell Asare, the uniqueness of the course is a large part of its appeal.
“This class is super different from other classes I’ve taken at Colgate in terms of content because it focuses on two niche topics which are the social interactions of bees and ants,” Al-Hashimi said. “With a topic so hyper-specific, it shows that everything has a deeper purpose.”
“[In] every Core class, the subject is impossible to see twice,” Asare added. “Each [Core] is completely special and the content always varies a lot. The part of [this] class description where it said we would compare bees and ants to humans, especially in the context of cult-like behaviors and AI design, is what I thought was really cool and something I might not have had the chance to learn about if I didn’t take this Core.”
Unlike in her seminar course on immunology, which is primarily upper-level neuroscience students, Niraula is exposed to a variety of disciplines and interests through Hive Mind.
“A lot of the students are econ or poli sci-interested students, so this is a very different crowd, which is interesting because I get asked questions I’ve never been asked before,” Niraula said. “I start with some very basic biology, so like how bees see the world, and then the basic sensory processing — the olfactory and the visual system we go into a little bit — but I don’t want to get too bogged down by the details and the jargon so I try to use simplified terms. I’m still working on that because what’s simple to me may not be simple to them.”
With such a diverse class demographic, Niraula has the opportunity to learn alongside her students, for example in determining if ants prefer sour patch kids to peanut butter cups (they do).
“My favorite [part of this class] is whatever the students’ favorite is, and from what I can tell I think the students like the experiments we’re doing now,” she said.
“We are actually running experiments this week where we are using ants to test different hypotheses about how [they] interact with one another, usually when communicating where food is,” Al-Hashimi said. “My group’s experiment is testing how long it takes ants to find food through a set trail that we decided on, and then testing again with obstacles in-between or no trail at all. This has been my favorite part because we get hands-on with all that we have learned throughout the semester.”
Engaging with the ants and creating experiments enabled students to independently explore questions and work through barriers to find the answers.
“Our group project [was my favorite part of the class] because there were a lot of ups and downs that we had to work through; [the project] was both challenging and entertaining because you are trying to get six ants to behave according to the conditions you have set for them,” Asare said.
Although an ant’s preferences between sour patch kids and Reese’s may not come up often outside of Hive Mind, Niraula sees value in taking the time to study the often-overlooked creatures.
“There’s no specific answer that I want students to take away [from this course], but there is a specific question, and that’s the question of intelligence,” Niraula said. “For example, who do we think is smart? Are ants smart? Are bees smart? Are humans smart? Who’s the smartest? In a way, we cannot do certain things that bees are doing, and there’s some amazing, humbling things that bees are doing.”
