Kit Yates

Thanks for having me on.

So yeah, in mathematical biology, we're taking real biological systems that people are interested in, from the swarming of locusts to the development of embryos to the way that cats get their pigmentation patterns.

I work on all three of those areas.

And we try to build a mathematical model.

So that might be some computer code or an equation that we write down, and we try to predict what's going to happen in those systems.

So that we can understand them better and do sort of in silica, what we call in silica experiments, so experiments in the computer or mathematical experiments where our collaborators who work with the real system actually just can't do that experiment because it's unfeasible or it's too big or it's too difficult to do.

So I think what we've discovered in this new study is that actually allowing people to be neutral.

So in the case of like a vote, allowing people to abstain from the vote actually can help a group to form a consensus decision more quickly.

And we've tried this out in a couple of different systems.

So one of them is in a locust experiment where we see locusts marching around in a ring shaped arena.

and they go round and round together in one direction, and then they sort of suddenly spontaneously switch.

And for years, people thought, well, it was just left-moving or clockwise-moving locusts butting heads with anti-clockwise-moving locusts and just convincing them to come the other way with them.

But actually, what we saw when we looked at the locusts more carefully was that

some of these locusts just stop.

They butt into someone and then they stop.

They don't immediately turn and they become effectively neutral.

And so you go through this, when you're switching from one direction to the other, you go through this high neutrality event where you have lots of locusts who are just stopped waiting for the others to sort of battle it out with each other and make up their mind.

And that allows them to form consensus more quickly when consensus is the important thing.

Well, we never got quite as far as the country level, but we did do some human-based experiments.

So we recruited people to play a game, if you like.