Scientists have discovered proof that the evolution of intelligence and larger brain sizes can be driven by cooperation and teamwork, shedding new light on the origins of what it means to be human. The study appears online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B and was led by scientists at Trinity College Dublin: Ph.D. student, Luke McNally, and Assistant Professor Dr. Andrew Jackson at the School of Natural Sciences in collaboration with Dr. Sam Brown of the University of Edinburgh.

The researchers constructed computer models of artificial organisms, endowed with artificial brains, which played each other in classic games, such as the "Prisoner's Dilemma," that encapsulate human social interaction. They used 50 simple brains, each with up to 10 internal processing and 10 associated memory nodes. The brains were pitted against each other in these classic games.

The game was treated as a competition, and just as real life favors successful individuals, the best of these digital organisms—defined as how high they scored in the games, less a penalty for the size of their brains—were allowed to reproduce and populate the next generation of organisms.

By allowing the brains of these digital organisms to evolve freely in their model, the researchers were able to show that the transition to cooperative society leads to the strongest selection for bigger brains. Bigger brains essentially did better as cooperation increased.

The social strategies that emerge spontaneously in these bigger, more intelligent brains show complex memory and decision making. Behaviors like forgiveness, patience, deceit and Machiavellian trickery all evolve within the game as individuals try to adapt to their social environment.

“The strongest selection for larger, more intelligent brains, occurred when the social groups were first beginning to start cooperating, which then kicked off an evolutionary Machiavellian arms race of one individual trying to outsmart the other by investing in a larger brain," Jackson said. "Our digital organisms typically start to evolve more complex ‘brains’ when their societies first begin to develop cooperation."

The idea that social interactions underlie the evolution of intelligence has been around since the mid-1970s, but support for this hypothesis has come largely from correlative studies where large brains were observed in more social animals. The authors of the current research provide the first evidence that mechanistically links decision making in social interactions with the evolution of intelligence. This study highlights the utility of evolutionary models of artificial intelligence in answering fundamental biological questions about our own origins.

“Our model differs in that we exploit the use of theoretical experimental evolution combined with artificial neural networks to actually prove that yes, there is an actual cause-and-effect link between needing a large brain to compete against and cooperate with your social group mates," McNally said. "Our extraordinary level of intelligence defines mankind and sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It has given us the arts, science and language, and above all else the ability to question our very existence and ponder the origins of what makes us unique both as individuals and as a species."

(Story materials and image provided by Trinity College Dublin.)

Jonah Lehrer—our opening keynote speaker at WEC 2012 in St. Louis—wrote in a recent New Yorker article that "the increasing complexity of human knowledge, coupled with the escalating difficulty of those remaining questions, means that people must either work together or fail alone."

It's true. Most of humanity's challenges are so complex today, it takes a group effort to work on them. The days of individual problem solvers are over. It's a new time, when collaboration and connections are tantamount to survival. 

Part of the group process, though, is empowering individuals to realize they have important ideas to share. It does no good to have a group working on a challenge if the individuals aren't aware of their own knowledge.

Dr. Bryan Bonner, an associate professor at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, believes the first step to building successful organizations is simple: self-realization by each participant of his or her unique knowledge and experience. 

Bonner co-authored “Leveraging Member Expertise to Improve Knowledge Transfer and Demonstrability in Groups” with Dr. Michael Baumann, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas in San Antonio. The study, published in February’s edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, concludes that “for groups to be successful, they must exploit the knowledge of their (individual) members effectively.” 

“It doesn’t take much. All you have to do is have people sit there for a while and think, ‘What is it I already know about this, and how can that help find the solution?’” Bonner said. “People find they often know more than they think they do; they realize that they might not know the whole answer to the problem, but there are a couple things they do know that might help the group come to a solution.” 

The researchers used 540 University of Utah undergraduate students, assigning half to three-member groups on one hand, with the remaining 270 participants working as individuals. Their task: arriving at estimates closest to the correct answers to such questions as the elevation of Utah’s King’s Peak; the weight of the heaviest man in history; the population of Utah; and the minimum driving distance between Salt Lake City and New York City. 

“We solve problems by using the many examples, good and bad, we’ve gathered through hard-won experience throughout our lives. The problem is that we’re not nearly as good at applying old knowledge to new problems as you’d think,” Bonner said. “Research over more than a century has tried, without much success, to figure out how we can do a better job.” 

Bonner and Baumann, however, are convinced their study shows that “although the sheer amount of brainpower it takes to consistently and effectively transfer learning from old to new is beyond many individuals, groups of people working together can actually be very good at it.” 

And that's where meetings come into play. They are a catalyst for change, for igniting new ideas, for giving your worldview a good, hard shake.

"The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together," Lehrer wrote. "It is the human friction that makes the sparks."  

From the corporate boardroom to the kitchen table, important decisions are often made in collaboration. But are two—or three or five—heads better than one? Not always, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. 

“People who make judgments by working with someone else are more confident in those judgments. As a result they take less input from other people”—and this myopia wipes out any advantage a pair may have over an individual, says psychologist Julia A. Minson, who conducted the study with Jennifer S. Mueller. “The collaborative process itself is the problem.” 

The findings appear in the journal Psychological Science, published by the Association for Psychological Science.

To test the hypothesis that confidence born of collaboration takes a toll on the quality of judgment, Minson and Mueller asked 252 people to estimate nine quantities related to U.S. geography, demographics and commerce, either individually or in pairs after discussion. They were then offered the estimates of other individuals and pairs and allowed to revise their own; the final estimates therefore could come from the efforts of two to four people. To sweeten the pot, participants earned a US$30 bonus for each of two estimation rounds, but lost $1 for each percentage point their answer deviated from correct. Individuals also rated their confidence in their judgments.

The results: People working with a partner were more confident in their estimates and significantly less willing to take outside advice. The pairs’ guesses were marginally more accurate than those of the individuals at first. But after revision (or lack thereof), that difference was gone. Even the combined judgments of four people yielded no better results than those of two or three. Finally, the researchers found that had the pairs yielded to outside input, their estimates would have been significantly more accurate. Their confidence was costly.

So should we toss out teamwork? No, says Minson, but since collaboration is expensive and time consuming, managers should use it efficiently. For one thing, a group of 10 is not 10 times better. 

“Mathematically, you get the biggest bang from the buck going from one decision-maker to two," Minson said. "For each additional person, that benefit drops off in a downward sloping curve.” 

Most important is awareness of the costs of teamwork. 

“If people become aware that collaboration leads to an increase in overconfidence, you can set up ways to mitigate it," Minson said. "Teams could be urged to consider and process each others’ inputs more thoroughly.”

The same goes for a couple choosing a mortgage or a car, Minson says. 

“Just because you make a decision with someone else and you feel good about it, don’t be so sure that you’ve solved the problem and you don’t need help from anybody else.”

(Story materials provided by the Association for Psychological Science.)

Google Wave was before its time and there's strong sentiment that the project was shut down too soon. I agree with that, by the way. Accordingly, I'm glad to see development is continuing as Apache Wave.

But the online data and presentation collaboration business is growing beyond Wave. The latest entry (complete with adorable characters) is Prezi. You can do some awesome things with Prezi, such as convert a boring PowerPoint slideshow into a more visually pleasing, scan-and-pan-and-tilt-and-zoom presentation. But what the company brings to the collaboration biz is Prezi Meeting.

Actress and writer Amy Poehler gave an excellent and inspiring speech at Harvard University yesterday in which she stressed the importance of working together. 

“As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration," she said. "Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life. No one is here today because they did it on their own. You’re all here today because someone gave you strength."

One of the best parts, and one that resonates with our industry, came around the 9:40 mark in her speech.

“The answer to a lot of your life’s questions is often in someone else’s face,” she said. “Try putting your iPhones down every once and awhile, and look at people's faces. People’s faces will tell you amazing things. Like if they are angry, or nauseous, or asleep."

Poehler's whole speech is wonderful and a great reminder that life is meant to be lived together with others and not alone. 

Ok, let's get this straight: Android is not a phone. It is not equivalent to the iPhone or the Blackberry. Technically, Android is an operating system, but the true life of Android (as ironic or contradictory as that may sound) is as a community.

Co-creation. We've all heard that buzzword a lot. What has developed with the Android open-source mobile environment is on-going co-creation of significant technology. Home brewed computer operating systems are no longer just for role-playing geeks sleeping in in a comic store basement.

In the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of One+, I did a little profile of Android-enthusiast and coder Steve Kondik. At the time, he and his team of wild, geographically dispersed volunteers were celebrating the fact that 250,000 people worldwide were using their free, customized Android operating system called CyanogenMod, and 1,000 additional users were downloading it each day.

What a different three months makes: The beta version of their latest operating system, CM7, was just released and saw more than 150,000 downloads in less than 24 hours!

The world's problems are so complex that they're too difficult for any one person to solve alone, according to scientist and writer Jonah Lehrer. I agree. We've reach a point in our evolution where collaboration is the best choice when setting out to produce or solve.  

"The complexity of our 21st century problems (clean coal, hydrogen cars, everything in neuroscience, string theory, etc.) has not just led to a postponement in peak creativity," Lehrer wrote on his blog, The Frontal Cortex. "It has also lessened the importance of the individual."

This is one reason why face-to-face meetings and conferences are so important. They offer those lone individuals the opportunity to connect with other like-minded people—or even those who think differently than them—to test out theories, exchange information or marry ideas into something productive. 

"If our current lists of global thinkers seem paltry, it’s because the best thinkers no longer exist by themselves, toiling away in a vacuum," he wrote. "Instead, they require the constant feedback and knowledge of others. We live in a world of such complexity that our problems increasingly exceed the possibilities of the individual mind. Collaboration is no longer an option."

A new article on Inc. breaks down the art of running a successful brainstorming session (I've sat through a few turkeys myself--how about you?). Among the key topics: including employees from all different departments within the company, setting up the space and checking titles at the door.

The following excerpt is from the section titled "It's all About the Quantity."

The goal of the brainstorming session should be to generate as many ideas as possible. Brendan Boyle, a partner in the design firm Ideo, notes that many brainstorming newbies make the mistake of trying to come up with the best idea, which encourages too much judgment. 

"You certainly don't want ideas being judged negatively, like, ‘Oh, that idea's terrible. We've tried it before,'" he says, since it can kill confidence and keep people from voicing less conventional ideas.

At Ideo, about 75 to 100 ideas are generated per brainstorming session. Have the facilitator keep the momentum going by pushing for more ideas, similar to the way an auctioneer would push for a higher bid. "Tell them, ‘All right we just got to 50, let's get to 60, let's get to 75,'" says Boyle. "Once you reach your goal number, then you can go back and be ruthless and evaluate everything. Because you have more ideas, chances are that you'll probably arrive at a better idea."