The title may be a play on a somewhat well-known philosophy paper, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel in <i>The Philosophical Review</i> (Oct 1974):<p>"Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals .... In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for <i>me</i> to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a <i>bat</i> to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task."<p>Edit: The author addresses these questions - without mentioning Nagel by name - in the section "Why Imagining Other Minds Is Important for Understanding them".
<i>Compared to a human brain with its 86 billion nerve cells, a bee’s brain may have only about a million. But each one of these cells has a finely branched structure that in complexity may resemble a full-grown oak tree. Each nerve cell can make connections with 10,000 other ones—hence there may be more than a billion such connection points in a bee brain—and each of these connections is at least potentially plastic, alterable by individual experience.</i><p>I remember from Robert Sapolsky's lectures that human neurons also take input from 10,000 (on average) other neurons. So bees are the same. But it feels like this paragraph is trying to convince me that the branching structure of bees is somehow more elaborate than the human equivalent.<p>Still reading, but I feel I can no longer trust the narrator.