The madness of crowds phenomenon in the collective decision-making by the cells, the cell’s metacognition and cancer

David B. Saakian

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2018, vol. 492, issue C, 1408-1418

Abstract: Recently it has been found that the collective decision-making in the group is efficient only when the confidences (a version of metacognition) of the members are similar, and it has been assumed that the metacognition (self-reference) in general is crucial for the human cooperation. Our goal is to map the decision making by the cells to decision making by humans, looking the analog of metacognition in the cells, accurately calculate the collective sensing of chemical gradients by the cells, and apply our results to cancer. We formulated the model for the chemeosensing by the cells with different diameters, solved it accurately and found that the collective chemosensing is very similar to the collective decision making by humans. We found that the collective sensing of the ligand concentration can be worse than for the most sensitive cell. We introduced the metacognition of the cells, and verify that the metacognition is impaired for the cancer case. We assume as a hypothesis that the impaired cell metacognition in case of cancer does not allow normal multi-cellularity, and cancer can arise when the ”two heads are better than one” principle fails, and there is a ”madness of crowds” phenomenon instead.

Keywords: Cell chemeosensing; Collective decision making; Metacognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:492:y:2018:i:c:p:1408-1418

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2017.11.068

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