Why Bees Get PTSD (And Why That Should Change How We Think About Consciousness)

A physicist explains how simple rules create complex emotions - even in insects

When researchers deliberately startled bees with threats they couldn't predict, something remarkable happened: the bees developed symptoms eerily similar to human PTSD. They became jumpy, their foraging patterns changed, and their social interactions were disrupted. But how can an insect, with less than a million neurons, experience something we consider uniquely human?

A bee's neural architecture might seem simple, but those 960,000 neurons - less than 1% of what humans have - create patterns of stunning complexity. From these simple components emerge behaviors indistinguishable from what we call "emotions" in humans.

If a bee can experience trauma with less than a million neurons, what does this tell us about consciousness itself? Perhaps our emotions aren't as special as we think...

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#Physics #Consciousness #ComplexSystems