Mesmerized by the Murmuration — on Human Potential
I’ve been fascinated by the murmuration (or flock) of starlings, the elegant and mesmerizing synchronized dance of these beautiful birds inspiring awe and wonder in my being. I’ve watched this video countless times, and keep coming back to it. It brings me to tears each time, feeling nature’s aliveness in full force. What is it about the fluid shape-shifting movement of these creatures that induces a state of awe, and raw beauty? What is it that this murmuration reflects in me as I watch?
It brings me to a state of rapture. A humbling, and a deep sense of the mystery of life. And with it, I feel inspired as to what’s possible in realizing our human potential — both individually and collectively. If we create environments in which we could freely live from our inherent genius — as in, express the unique gifts that each one of us has — and collaborate from that place, then what could come into emergence? It seems a natural outcome would be something that we perhaps can’t yet conceive of in our imagination.
In her book Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown describes the term emergence as “the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions”. What’s key here is that the behavior of the system results more from the interaction of the components than from the behavior of the components themselves, with the emergent system considered to be much greater than the sum of its parts.
Back to the starlings. Naturally, I like to look at how things work. What’s the mechanism behind the murmuration, and what can we learn from it in the way that we operate as humans, organizations and societies? Firstly, a murmuration can consist of thousands, and sometimes millions(!), of individual starlings. The behavior is usually animated by the presence of a predator like a hawk or peregrine falcon, and the flock moves as an intelligent cloud to evade the predator. The murmuration is self-organized (with no one “leader”), with synchronized behavior among the starlings allowing them to continuously change direction almost simultaneously. It’s “the rapid transmission of local behavioral response to neighbors” that enables such startling synchronicity, as noted by the authors of a 2015 paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
If among a flock of thousands of birds it is clear that not every bird could keep track of all the others, the question then arises — Who’s keeping track of whom?! Thankfully a team of physicists developed a mathematical model based on studies and observations that identified the optimal number of flock-mates for each bird to track. They found that each bird interacts only with its seven closest neighbors. And from this simple rule, a whole murmuration moves and undulates. Something wondrous is born that doesn’t resemble any of the individual birds, but is new and different altogether.
So what do we humans have to learn from murmurations? How can we serve our unique purpose and interact with one another with clear signals such that we create synergies, add value to the whole, and generate conditions that give rise to the emergence of something new? Adrienne Maree Brown articulated this sentiment through a process she described in Emergent Strategy:
“Cells may not know civilization is possible. They don’t amass as many units as they can sign up to be the same. No — they grow until they split, complexify. Then they interact and intersect and discover their purpose — I am a lung cell! I am a tongue cell! — and they serve it. And they die. And what emerges from these cycles are complex organisms, systems, movements, societies.”
I know I’ve left more questions here (that’s the point!). This is what I’m (a)musing about, and I’d love to hear from you — How do you feel when watching this? What comes up for you?
