This is from a Friendfeed thread from a little while ago that I wanted to preserve (with a little editing):

So apparently honey bees use a form of "democracy" to figure out where to build new hives. What this makes me think of is how neurons work. Individual neurons fire or don't fire depending on whatever input they're receiving. Depending on the net sum of inhibitory and excitatory stimuli, either a signal will propagate to the next neuron in the network, or it won't. The thing is, every neuron has a refractory period, where it definitely won't fire, no matter how much excitatory stimuli you're hitting it with.

With honeybees, scouts will scour a particular area for an appropriate site. When a scout finds a good site, she starts sending signals in the form of a dance to surrounding honey bees. Some will propagate this signal (if they agree with the scout's initial assessment) while others won't. Apparently the key factor to reaching a consensus is that each scout has a refractory period, where she stops sending the signal even if she thinks her scouted site is the best site possible. If there were fanatics who kept sending the signal no matter what, the system wouldn't work.

What this leads me to is the argumentative theory of reasoning. Supposedly, this arose because of the selective advantage of being able to make group decisions accurately but also without always having to kill each other when we disagreed. We are a social species, so consensus is often necessary to keep the peace. The conclusion of this theory is that we don't reason to find the truth, we reason to win: the signal we send out must be binary, either positive or negative, fire or don't fire. If we functioned like honeybees, this could probably work well. No matter how vehemently we believed something was true, we'd eventually get tired of shouting it at other people and stop for a while. (And anecdotally speaking, this is actually what most reasonable people seem to do.) Eventually, a single decision would dominate within the group, and things would actually get done.

But we obviously have fanatics among us, who never get tired of their ideas no matter what, and just keep shouting them at other people continuously at full volume. What fanatics make me think of are damaged neurons that cause epilepsy. This is exactly what they do: regardless of the input they receive, they keep firing continuously, and while they still have some sort of refractory period, it won't extinguish the signal they're trying to send. If enough of the other neurons propagate the signal from the damaged neuron, the end result is a seizure.

The crazy, speculative thing this leads me to is to an article I was reading in a science fiction literary magazine: if each person is analogous to an individual neuron, the development of the Internet and of social media specifically has increased both the number of dendrites we have (the receiving ends of a neuron) and the reach of our axons (the transmitting end of a neuron.) Social media in effect makes us part of a vast neural network.

So essentially, social media is wiring us up into a gigantic overmind. The question is, will it actually develop into a working nervous system, or will it be frequently convulsed with the unquenchable ravings of fanatics who cannot stop transmitting a signal?

It occurs to me that in a paradigm where excitatory signals are easy to send, true control is established via inhibition. As an example, this is how the human eye manages to adapt to such a wide range of illumination. Photoreceptors actually generate "dark current" when not being stimulated by light. At rest, they're depolarized, and they release the neurotransmitter glutamate (which is normally excitatory.) But when a photon causes rhodopsin to change conformation and activates the coupled G-protein, this actually causes the photoreceptor cell to hyperpolarize and stop releasing glutamate.

I'm beginning to suspect inhibition and inhibition of inhibition applies to other systems. The ability to veto is power. Neurons that secrete the neurotransmitter GABA, which usually has an inhibitory effect on target neurons, are quite numerous within the central nervous system. One of their major functions is to keep excitatory pathways in check. But interestingly, some GABAergic neurons also keep other GABAergic neurons in check--inhibiting the inhibitors. (Which is theoretically why ethanol tends to initially reduce inhibition--both on the molecular level and at the organism level--but with higher dosages, it causes sedation and functions as a depressant.) It's checks-and-balances all the way through. Without checks-and-balances, the system gets stuck in convulsions.