"You have a hive mind." Fascinating stuff.

Our brains seem to work not by generating only correct actions and executing them in serial, but rather by representing many possibilities in parallel, and suppressing all but one. When this inhibitory action is lost, as happens in people with frontal lobe damage, these multiple possibilities become a burden, and can lead to so-called utilization behaviors. Such impaired individuals will indiscriminately reach for objects placed in front of them - a hairbrush or a hammer, for example - and use them even in inappropriate contexts.

In essence, despite our feeling that we are singular, unified agents, we are more like hive minds unto ourselves, our brains abuzz with multiple, often conflicting plans and interests that must be managed. To Dr. Thomas Seeley, a professor of neurobiology at Cornell University, the hive mind is more than just a metaphor. In a recent paper in Science, Seeley and his colleagues describe a potential deep parallel between how brains and bee swarms come to a decision. With no central planner or decider, both brains and bee hives can resolve their inner differences to commit to single courses of action.

"I am real!"

There's a permathread in the econoblogger world about modeling right now (and mathbabe is wicked smaht).

So, you might think of the hive mind as a meta-model; a model for how models are created, and why some models are chosen over others.

NOTE I've been resisting making this joke, but I find now that I've failed: One of the top ten things you don't want to hear from a guy is "My former girlfriend was a model." And with a lot of these economists, you get the feeling that's what you'd hear... [ok, ducks...]