Jessica Flack - Finding the right questions, the wisdom of complexity, and deep physical and cognitive fitness

Dr. and professor Jessica Flack has been a dream guest for Origins since the beginning - the kind of generous intellect and polymath whose words and work expand everyone around her. She also might be the person we can place our trust in to help us learn how to make sense of an increasingly complex world.

Jessica is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute where she directs the Collective Computation Group (C4) and is the chair for the institute's brilliant public events. She's the Chief Editor of the transdisciplinary open access journal, Collective Intelligence.

Flack's research focuses on collective computation and its role in the emergence of robust structure and function in nature and society. As an evolutionary biologist and complexity scientist she has pioneered work to study how biological collectives of all sorts, from groups of cells forming neural tissue, to groups of macaques forming animal societies, to groups of online gamers forming virtual societies, jointly process information to arrive at group behaviors. Central to this work is to understand how nature overcomes subjectivity inherent in information processing systems to produce collective, ordered states.

But her interests and knowledge expand across seemingly every space, including cooking, poetry, philosophy, surfing, backcountry running & travel, film and music. It is overwhelming to attempt to keep up with everything that she is learning and doing.

Flack was formerly founding director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her Ph.D. from Emory in 2003, studying cognitive science, animal behavior and evolutionary theory, and B.A. with honors from Cornell in 1996.

You can find Flack’s work in almost any well-known media outlet, including the Quanta Magazine, the BBC, NPR, The Economist and through a long list of paradigm-shifting academic publications.

We delved into her polymathic and complexity lens on living in the here and the now.

It is a distinct pleasure to bring Jessica to you on Origins.