Abstract
By tapping into social cues, individuals in a group may gain access to higher-order computational capacities that mirror the group's responses to its environment. In 1905 the field naturalist Edmund Selous, a confirmed Darwinian and meticulous observer of bird behaviour, wrote of his wonderment when observing tens of thousands of starlings coming together to roost: "they circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net...wheeling, rending, darting...a madness in the sky".Throughout his life Selous struggled to explain the remarkable synchrony and coherence of motion during flocking, and he concluded that somehow a connectivity of individual minds and transference of thoughts must underlie such behaviour.
