When it’s raining and you’re getting wet, have you ever wondered how you’re getting wet? Rain is made up of molecules composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and individually, neither hydrogen nor oxygen is wet. Even a single water molecule isn’t wet. However, when you have a lot of water molecules together in the right conditions, you become wet.
This wetness of water is an example of an “emergent” property. Emergent properties are phenomena that can’t be explained by the basic properties of the individual parts, but only manifest when those parts are in large numbers. Emergent phenomena are found everywhere in nature, and understanding how they arise could help solve some of our biggest mysteries.
“There is a sense in which nothing in science makes sense without emergence,” says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and author based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
In the field of physics, certain materials exhibit superconductivity, where a large number of electrons can move without resistance, but the reasons behind this aren’t always clear. Similarly, neuroscientists have found that consciousness seems to emerge from collective behavior of neurons. In both cases, understanding the basic building blocks of the system doesn’t explain the phenomenon, let alone allow for its recreation.
“Ultimately, we want to explain under what circumstances we will see novel properties,” says Larissa Albantakis, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
However, studying emergence is both promising and exceedingly difficult. The standard “reductionist” approach to scientific investigation involves breaking down large-scale systems…
