A group of blue-faced birds step through the grass shoulder to shoulder, red eyes looking around. They look like middle schoolers seeking a cafeteria table at lunchtime. Perhaps they’re not so different.

A new study, led by Damien Farine, an ornithologist who studies collective behaviour, shows that the vulturine guineafowl of eastern Africa, like humans, have multilevel societies. In the past, scientists assumed such social structures required a lot of brainpower. But the pea-brained guineafowl are revealing the faults in that assumption.

These large birds wander across the landscape in packs, often walking so closely that their bodies touch. They may fight each other to maintain their strict hierarchies (等级制度), but at other times they engage in friendly behaviours like sharing food.

Suspecting the guineafowl might have a social structure, Dr. Farine and his colleagues began a thorough study of their society. For a whole year, they made daily observations of 441 birds. Coloured leg bands in unique combinations let researchers tell the black-and-blue birds apart. They also attached GPS devices to the backs of 58 birds, which let them see exactly where every group went, 24 hours a day.

The findings of the research suggest that the vulturine guineafowl have a multilevel society. There are groups within groups within the population as a whole. There even seem to be groups of friends within the small groups. This is the first time anyone has observed such a society in a bird.

And Dr. Farine emphasizes this particular bird’s tiny brain size: “ They don’t only have small brains relative to mammals (哺乳动物), they also have quite small brains relative to other birds, ” he said.

According to him, living in this kind of society might actually make it easier to keep track of the social order. For example, if groups are stable and a bird can identify just one or two individuals within a group, it knows which group it’s looking at — no need for a brain that can recognize every single animal. Multilevel societies also let animals adjust their group sizes based on whatever challenges they’re facing. Depending on what enemies or resources are around, it might make sense to travel in a combined group rather than a smaller one.

“ Having a multilevel structure may not require having a large brain, ” Dr. Farine said. There may be more birds and other animals out there that, although small-brained, have societies as many-leveled as our own.

Fear of Missing Out

It’s a common experience: You’re scrolling through a social media page, and you see pictures of friends traveling or going to parties. Suddenly you start to wonder why you’re not doing those things. Are you missing out on something fun and exciting because you’re locked into everyday life? This experience has come to be known as the fear of missing out, sometimes abbreviated(缩写) FOMO. 【小题1】 But with the rise of social media, FOMO is becoming much more common.

Wanting to be in on the fun when exciting things are happening is completely normal. But for some people, it can lead to an addiction to checking their phones to find out what other people are doing. Even while doing things that are fun or necessary, people can feel like there’s something better going on elsewhere. This urge to connect can lead them to disconnect from the people they are actually with. 【小题2】It can even be dangerous; some people try to check messages while driving.

Remember that what people choose to post on social media does not necessarily reflect their life overall. People tend to pick and choose the things they share, so we only ever know a small part of anyone else’s life.

【小题3】 You cannot be everywhere and do everything that might be interesting or productive, and that’s OK.

It might even be necessary to turn off your phone or log out of social media for a while. 【小题4】You can even set particular times in your day to check email and social media. By stepping away for a time, you can help keep other people’s lives in perspective.

Finally, focus on the things in front of you. Enjoy them, do them well and let everything else go. 【小题5】

Don’t let the fear of missing out cause you to miss out on the good things you have in life. Relax, enjoy what you do and let other people enjoy their lives without envying them.

Ten years ago, the professors Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren encountered a contradiction. On the one hand, we recognize that other people are more likely to make creative breakthroughs when they persevere. On the other hand. when we feel stuck on a problem, most of us fail to sec how successful we’ll be if we just keep trying. We tend to believe that our creativity drops over time — that if our best ideas don’t come to us immediately, they won’t come at all.

Lucas and Nordgren call this misunderstanding the “creative cliff illusion”, which refers to the false belief that our creativity sharply declines after an initial period of effort, leading us to underestimate our ability to generate new and innovative ideas with continued perseverance. In one experiment, they asked participants to spend 10 minutes generating “as many original ideas for things to eat and drink at a Thanksgiving dinner as you can. ” Afterward, participants were asked to guess how many ideas they would come up with during a second 10-minute period. Most expected to generate far fewer ideas the second time around, but in fact they produced just as many during that second period — 66 percent more than they had guessed. And those were rated by other people as more creative than the initial ideas.

Though we tend to think our ability to come up with ideas is easily consumed, we actually get more creative the longer we focus on a problem or task. One major reason for this is known as the “serial-order effect”. Each next creative idea we have is likely to be better than the one that came before.

The serial-order effect isn’t always easy to see. Most of us have adopted the belief that creativity should feel easy, or “fluent”. And so we associate mental difficulty with pointlessness. But working through bad ideas is a necessary step in the creative process. The first solutions that come to mind tend to be either preexisting ideas or popular wisdom. These are the paths of least resistance. Though avoiding them requires some work, it’s the surest way to find original ideas that aren’t immediately manifest.

The serial-order effect applies to tasks that last minutes or days, but creativity also improves across years, decades, and even careers. The life’s work of most successful entrepreneurs proves it.