Lakshwin Shreesha and Michael Levin

Individual cells have numerous competencies in physiological and metabolic spaces. However, multicellular collectives can reliably navigate anatomical morphospace towards much larger, reliable endpoints. Understanding the robustness and control properties of this process is critical for evolutionary developmental biology, bioengineering, and regenerative medicine. One mechanism that has been proposed for enabling individual cells to coordinate toward specific morphological outcomes is the sharing of stress (where stress is a physiological parameter that reflects the current amount of error in the context of a homeostatic loop). Here, we construct and analyze a multiscale agent-based model of morphogenesis in which we quantitatively examine the impact of stress sharing on the ability to reach target morphology. We found that stress sharing improves the morphogenetic efficiency of multicellular collectives; populations with stress sharing reached anatomical targets faster. Moreover, stress sharing influenced the future fate of distant cells in the multi-cellular collective, enhancing cells’ movement and their radius of influence, consistent with the hypothesis that stress sharing works to increase cohesiveness of collectives. During development, anatomical goal states could not be inferred from observation of stress states, revealing the limitations of knowledge of goals by an extern observer outside the system itself. Taken together, our analyses support an important role for stress sharing in natural and engineered systems that seek robust large-scale behaviors to emerge from the activity of their competent components.

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Andrea Civilini, Onkar Sadekar, Federico Battiston, Jesús Gómez-Gardeñes, and Vito Latora

Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 167401

Understanding how cooperative behaviors can emerge from competitive interactions is an open problem in biology and social sciences. While interactions are usually modeled as pairwise networks, the units of many real-world systems can also interact in groups of three or more. Here, we introduce a general framework to extend pairwise games to higher-order networks. By studying social dilemmas on hypergraphs with a tunable structure, we find an explosive transition to cooperation triggered by a critical number of higher-order games. The associated bistable regime implies that an initial critical mass of cooperators is also required for the emergence of prosocial behavior. Our results show that higher-order interactions provide a novel explanation for the survival of cooperation.

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Conor Heins, Beren Millidge, Lancelot Da Costa,  Richard P. Mann,  Karl J. Friston, Iain D. Couzin

PNAS

We introduce a model of collective behavior, proposing that individual members within a group, such as a school of fish or a flock of birds, act to minimize surprise. This active inference approach naturally generates well-known collective phenomena such as cohesion and directed movement without explicit behavioral rules. Our model reveals intricate relationships between individual beliefs and group properties, demonstrating that beliefs about uncertainty can shape collective decision-making accuracy. As agents update their generative model in real time, groups become more sensitive to external perturbations and more robust in encoding information. Our work provides fresh insights into understanding collective dynamics and could inspire strategies in the study of animal behavior, swarm robotics, and distributed systems.

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Ángel Goñi-Moreno

Communications of the ACM

Leveraging the synergies between theoretical CS and synthetic biology to create powerful cellular computers and move beyond Turing computation.

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Marten Scheffer, Claudi L. Bockting, Denny Borsboom, et al.

JAMA Psychiatry

Importance Psychiatric disorders may come and go with symptoms changing over a lifetime. This suggests the need for a paradigm shift in diagnosis and treatment. Here we present a fresh look inspired by dynamical systems theory. This theory is used widely to explain tipping points, cycles, and chaos in complex systems ranging from the climate to ecosystems.

Observations In the dynamical systems view, we propose the healthy state has a basin of attraction representing its resilience, while disorders are alternative attractors in which the system can become trapped. Rather than an immutable trait, resilience in this approach is a dynamical property. Recent work has demonstrated the universality of generic dynamical indicators of resilience that are now employed globally to monitor the risks of collapse of complex systems, such as tropical rainforests and tipping elements of the climate system. Other dynamical systems tools are used in ecology and climate science to infer causality from time series. Moreover, experiences in ecological restoration confirm the theoretical prediction that under some conditions, short interventions may invoke long-term success when they flip the system into an alternative basin of attraction. All this implies practical applications for psychiatry, as are discussed in part 2 of this article.

Conclusions and Relevance Work in the field of dynamical systems points to novel ways of inferring causality and quantifying resilience from time series. Those approaches have now been tried and tested in a range of complex systems. The same tools may help monitoring and managing resilience of the healthy state as well as psychiatric disorders.

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See Also: A Dynamical Systems View of Psychiatric Disorders—Practical Implications: A Review