The flock and the neighbours
A short exploration of what a starling flock teaches us — and especially of what it does not.
Starling flocks form a beloved example in complexity science. Thousands of birds, one common shape, without leader, without plan, without blueprint. On video it looks almost magical. From science, we believe by now to have some sight on the how.
An individual starling takes account of roughly seven neighbours. No more. She orients herself to the average direction of those seven, keeps her distance, and synchronises her movements. No bird knows what the flock as a whole is doing. And yet there is a whole — a shape that forms, deforms, waves, contracts, fans out.
The scientists who discovered this (an Italian team, early 2000s) called this principle scale-free correlations. What happens with one bird propagates through the flock, not because they all listen to each other but because the network of neighbour-relations is so dense that a change travels quickly.
Why this is tempting for us
In psychotherapy it is tempting to use this image. We would, honestly, wish that our clients could — like the flock — reorient themselves to a healthier pattern from simple local interactions. We would wish for a consulting-room equivalent of those seven neighbours: a few simple rules that let the system reorient.
And there are certainly beautiful ideas in that direction. A family reacts to each other through local interactions (eye contact, tone, touch) — not via central planning. A team in care finds its rhythm through local signals. A patient who gets her own daily rhythm back in order rarely does so through one grand plan, but through small adjustments that make the other small adjustments easier.
Where the metaphor breaks down
But — and this seems to us not unimportant — we are not starlings. Humans have language, memory, meaning, ambivalence, conflict. A starling is in a sense "empty" — she does what her neighbours do. A human has an inner world that weighs as much as the outer.
One who works too enthusiastically with the flock metaphor may fall into something similar to what we used to do with "the family system": the individual becomes invisible, everything is interaction. That is, in our experience, a choice with clinical consequences — sometimes happy, sometimes less so.
What can be learned from it — with caution
The flock metaphor can, if handled with care, serve in psycho-education — for instance as illustration of the thought that ordering does not always arise top-down. That a patient herself, in interaction with the people around her, can find a new form without anyone needing to know precisely which knob to turn. It can be a consoling and activating idea for people who otherwise feel too heavy to come into motion.
It would, however, be reaching too far to claim that psychotherapy "is in essence flock formation". There it grows too vague. A flock is a beautiful example of self-organisation. It seems more an overture than an explanation. The rest of the piece we make in the consulting room, with language and silence and all the mess that comes with being human.
And yet — one who sees a flock of starlings pass over the Dutch coast feels, for a brief moment, another register for what ordering can be. That is no empirics, but it costs nothing to bring it along.