Why the Brain is like a Starling Murmuration

In an essay published in Aeon last year, neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa argues that the brain works less like a machine with discrete parts and more like a murmuration of starlings — a complex, adaptive system in which function emerges from interaction.

In such systems, sophisticated behavior can arise without central control, Pessoa explains. The brain is an “interactionally complex system where functions emerge from distributed, overlapping networks of regions rather than being localised to specific areas,” he writes, dubbing this concept the “entangled brain.” Similarly, among starlings, no single bird leads the murmuration. Rather, each bird takes cues from the movements of its nearest neighbors. Out of these local interactions, the murmuration emerges as a complex, coordinated pattern that responds to predators and the environment.

Pessoa contrasts this with a view that still shapes much scientific and organizational thinking: “function is tied to structure.” This premise has long encouraged researchers to look for “organs of the mind” and clean, one-to-one mappings between areas of the brain and functional outcomes, he explains. However, he argues that this pursuit has repeatedly failed to produce a stable list of area–function pairs. What starts as a simple mapping tends to evolve into a one-to-many relationship, as evidence shows the same region participates in multiple functions.

The alternative is to treat function as an emergent property of connectivity and coordination. “The functional unit is not to be found at the level of the brain area, as commonly proposed,” Pessoa writes. “Instead, we need to consider neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions, much like the murmuration of starlings forms a single pattern from the collective behaviour of individual birds.”

The starling murmuration not only inspired our name, it also underpins the philosophy that informs our perspective. Organizations typically approach culture risk governance and supervision as a problem of “functions” tied to “formal structures.” However, if you accept that culture is an emergent property of interaction — incentives, information flows, and norms — then risk and performance failures rarely trace to a single “culprit.” Governance and oversight must therefore focus less on formal structures in isolation and more on how the system’s informal feedback loops tie directly to conduct that drives material risk outcomes.