The world around us is full of examples of collective activity that exhibit striking coordination and at the same time doesn’t require centralized control. Some examples are large-scale animal migrations, coordinated insect behavior, and complex patterns of human activity in the World Wide Web. Synchronous fight maneuvers exhibited by bird flocks even led scientists to suggest that birds were capable of telepathy as late as 1920. Now, that fascinating idea has been abandoned, however, using tools of statistical physics allowed us to gain insights into the mechanisms that underlie these complex behaviors.

Strikingly, similar physical formalism can be used to explain the properties of the brain’s electrical signals and the activity of bees in the hive. During the presentation, we will explore how the concept of phase transition, developed by physicists to describe what happens when matter changes states can help us understand the emergence of coordinated activity in the human brains and the motion of bees inside the hive.

For the second part of the presentation, we will explore another physical concept - random walks, devised to describe the erratic motion of particles suspended in the liquid. This concept can be used to model animal foraging and human movement. We’ll investigate how a special type of random walk, known as the Lévy walk is related to optimal foraging trajectory and how it emerges in the trajectories of football players in the field, linking the popular game, and foraging patterns of the wild animals.