Thought-Transference (or What?) in Birds, published in 1931, must have one of the greatest titles of any fortean work. More importantly, in it ornithologist Edward Selous documented a profound mystery. A keen bird-watcher for many years, he witnessed first-hand many instances where birds behaved in ways that he could only explain in terms of psychic powers. He described in painstaking detail coordinated movement within flocks, including rooks, gulls, lapwings, dunlins, swans, and starlings. Rooks rose from a field “like a leaping up of black flame, so instantaneous and unanimous was it. It is transfused thought, thought transference – collective thinking practically. What else can it be?”

Starlings flock together in their thousands (as seen above in Denmark), giving the appearance of a cloud of shifting smoke, perfectly coordinated: “How, without some process of thought transference so rapid as to amount practically to simultaneous collective thinking, are these things to be explained?” Or again, he observed goldfinches acting in unison: “Their little minds must act together… it seems to me that they must think collectively, all at the same time.”

Selous was a scrupulous observer, warning against “the great tendency to see an animal do just what it is supposed to do”, and insisting on the recording of minute details. (Scientifically admirable, though it did make his work “almost unreadable”, according to one reviewer.)

In spite of all his work, Selous’s theory was largely ignored by his contemporaries. Thought transference was somewhat in vogue in the 1930s, but serious scientists were inclined to avoid anything that smacked of the séance room. None suggested a better explanation as to how flocks of birds managed to be quite so well coordinated.

There was an equivalent mystery in the behaviour of termites. How could a swarm of mindless, short-sighted insects build something as complex as a termite mound? Where was the coordinating leadership? In 1937, the South African biologist Eugène Marais published Die Siel van die Mier (“The Soul of the White Ant”) 1 drawing comparisons between a termite mound and the human body, with workers being equivalent to red blood cells, soldiers as white blood cells. Of course, there had to be a brain. “

The queen is the psychological centre of the community; she is the brain of the organism which we call a termitary,” wrote Marais. “From this shapeless, immobile object, imprisoned in her narrow vault, there emanates a power which directs all the activities of her subjects.”

Twenty years later, another biologist, Pierre-Paul Grassé, watched termites during the early phase of mound-building. He realised that they were all following three simple rules: “Step 1: Find some earth and chew it with saliva to create a pellet. Step 2: Wander around at random. Step 3: When you find a raised area, drop the pellet and go back to Step 1.”

Any number of termites can join in, and the results are the same. Any raised area becomes higher as it accumulates earth pellets; the larger it becomes, the greater chance that wandering termites will find it, and the more it grows. The entire building effort quickly focuses on a few pillars of pellets. When these reach a certain height, a new behaviour kicks in and the termites start to build arches between them. The whole elaborate termite mound with its chambers and tunnels and sophisticated air circulation arises from the work of thousands of termites with no central coordination at all, just a few simple rules. Grasse termed this remarkable effect “Cooperation without communication.”

One biologist has calculated that a termite’s brain does not even contain enough neurons to describe the finished mound: they are building something that they literally cannot conceive. This is an example of ‘emergence’, which is complexity arising from simple rules in a self-organising system. It would be wrong to call this type of collective behaviour brainless. A new branch of computer science uses computer ‘agents’ mimicking insect-like behaviours to solve problems far faster than conventional techniques. Marais might better have described the individual termites as cells in an enormous brain.

In the 1980s, researcher Craig Reynolds developed ‘Boids’, a computer simulation of flocking birds. Each member of the flock follows three simple rules – cluster ing, maintaining separation and matching speed. Simulations using these rules match real life flocking very closely, and Hollywood uses them for producing CGI effects such as the bat swarms in Batman Begins.

The answer to Selous’s conundrum of how flocks of birds communicate is far simpler than he imagined. Just by responding to the motions of its immediate neighbours, each bird ensures that the entire flock of thousands is more tightly coordinated than the Red Arrows. Although Selous is now recognised as a pioneer of ethology – the science of behaviour – his mistake was to assume that flocking behaviour needed an organising intelligence. This leads to the question of whether other unexplained phenomena might be the result of emergence.

Consider the classic case of someone telephoning at the precise moment that you think of them for the first time in years. Could this be because the thought processes of both people are unconsciously following the same unspoken pattern? Perhaps we are all, like the termites, part of a ‘hive mind’ without our realising it.

All sorts of wonders, from psychic powers to the mysteries of significant coincidences, may not be as impossible as science currently assumes. Perhaps, like the apparent avian telepathy observed by Selous, they are simply the results of an emergent pattern, the causes of which are too simple for us to see.