The flock and the neighbours
A short exploration of what a starling flock can teach us, and above all of what it does not.
Starling flocks are a favourite example in complexity science. Thousands of birds together form a single moving shape, without a leader, plan or blueprint. On video it looks almost enchanting. By now there is, as far as we can judge, some scientific insight into how it works.
An individual starling takes account of roughly seven neighbours. She orients herself to the average direction of those neighbours, keeps her distance and attunes her movements to theirs. No single bird oversees what the flock as a whole is doing, and yet a whole emerges: a shape that ripples, gathers and fans out again.
The Italian researchers who studied this described scale-free correlations in this connection (Cavagna et al., 2010). What happens with one bird propagates through the flock, not because all the birds listen to one another, but because the network of neighbour relations is so dense that a change spreads quickly.
Why this image appeals to us
In psychotherapy it is tempting to use this image. To be honest, we would like it if our clients, like the flock, could orient themselves towards a healthier pattern through simple local interactions, and if the consulting room had an equivalent of those seven neighbours: a few simple rules that give the system a new direction.
There are certainly useful ideas in it. Family members respond to one another through local interactions, such as eye contact, tone and touch, and not through central planning. A care team finds its rhythm through local signals. And a patient who gets her daily rhythm back in order rarely does so with one grand plan, but rather with small adjustments that make the next small adjustments easier.
Where the metaphor runs aground
Still, people are not starlings, and that seems to us not unimportant. People have language, memory, meaning-making, ambivalence and conflict. A starling is in a sense "empty": she does what her neighbours do. A person has an inner world that weighs as heavily as the outer world.
Working too enthusiastically with the flock metaphor can lead to something resembling the way "the family system" was sometimes thought about in the past: the individual drops out of view and everything becomes interaction. In our experience such a choice has clinical consequences, sometimes favourable, sometimes less so.
What can cautiously be learned from it
With some care, the flock metaphor can be useful in psychoeducation, for example to show that order does not always arise from above. A patient can, in interaction with the people around her, find a new form without anyone knowing exactly which knob needs turning. For people who feel too heavy to get moving, that can be a comforting and activating thought.
It would go too far, however, to claim that psychotherapy is "in essence flock formation"; the image then becomes too vague. A flock is a fine example of self-organisation, but more an overture than an explanation. The rest of the piece is played out in the consulting room, with language and silence and all the untidiness that comes with being human.
And yet: seeing a flock of starlings pass over the Dutch coast briefly gives a different image of what order can be. That is not an empirical argument, but it is an image worth keeping.