ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
Liquid brains, solid brains.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Uncovering complementary information sharing in spider monkey collective foraging using higher-order spatial networks.Npj complexity · 2026Article
- Foraging ants as liquid brains: Movement heterogeneity shapes collective efficiency.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Biological detail and graph structure in network neuroscience.Frontiers in network physiology · 2025Review
- Vegetal memory through the lens of transcriptomic changes - recent progress and future practical prospects for exploiting plant transcriptional memory.Plant signaling & behavior · 2024Review
- Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.Interface focus · 2024Review
- Beehive scale-free emergent dynamics.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates.Communications biology · 2024Review
- Socially adaptive cognitive architecture for human-robot collaboration in industrial settings.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2024Article
- Biological Robots: Perspectives on an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field.Soft robotics · 2023Article
- Tissues as networks of cells: towards generative rules of complex organ development.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Review
- Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Review
- Modeling intentionality in the human brain.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Entropy, Economics, and Criticality.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Embodiment in distributed information processing: "Solid" plants versus "liquid" ant colonies.Quantitative plant biology · 2022Review
- Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2022Article
- Towards the Idea of Molecular Brains.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Fate of Duplicated Neural Structures.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Ecological memory and relocation decisions in fungal mycelial networks: responses to quantity and location of new resources.The ISME journal · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cognitive networks have evolved a broad range of solutions to the problem of gathering, storing and responding to information. Some of these networks are describable as static sets of neurons linked in an adaptive web of connections. These are 'solid' networks, with a well-defined and physically persistent architecture. Other systems are formed by sets of agents that exchange, store and process information but without persistent connections or move relative to each other in physical space. We refer to these networks that lack stable connections and static elements as 'liquid' brains, a category that includes ant and termite colonies, immune systems and some microbiomes and slime moulds. What are the key differences between solid and liquid brains, particularly in their cognitive potential, ability to solve particular problems and environments, and information-processing strategies? To answer this question requires a new, integrative framework. This article is part of the theme issue 'Liquid brains, solid brains: How distributed cognitive architectures process information'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.