concept

Distributed cognition

When information processing and decision-making live not in a central brain but spread across many simple agents and the environment itself. Each part follows only a few local rules, yet the whole behaves as if a coordinating intelligence were at work - even though no one is in charge. An ant colony finding the shortest path to food, a bee swarm choosing an optimal new home, a forest that "responds" to a threat: all are cognition without a single thinker.