About Collective Intelligence

Today I want to write about the intellectual power of groups of people. That is what I call here collective intelligence. We believe that the intelligence of the human brain comes from the interconnection of the basic processing units, the neurons. They are interconnected in many complicated ways and give a parallel processing capability to the brain. I believe that the brain can follow at the same time and in a subconscious level many thought paths in order to extract a result. These different thought patterns create different results but the combination of the results that is created tends to be an acceptable choice. I suspect that the brain uses a very refined technique for mutual exclusion between the results smoothing them to match.
These multimethod way of thinking elevates intelligence adjusting the way of thinking to the specific problem by a fuzzy process and not a completely rational one. That way techniques that are new to a field may subconsciously or consciously (where personality creates the tendency to specific ways of thinking) be applied to it and give better results and this is how innovation works.
Even though I cannot be sure about the previous theory in a neurological basis I strongly believe that the element of multimethod approach exists in both conscious and subconscious level boosting our intelligence. Collective intelligence works exactly the same way. In my opinion the collective intelligence of a group of people is more than the sum of the individual intelligences. The way this is achieved is that the intelligence of a person can be enhanced by the interaction with the different personalities and ways of thought in a group. In simple words the person can adopt the way of thinking of the others and adapt it to its specific thought pattern creating an evolved thought path. It is like the "your words gave me an idea " situation. This evolution happens to all the members of the team collectively raising the intelligence in terms of creativity and productivity. This process is continoous and the constant cooperation of people gives better result than the case where after a time of cooperation the team is broken to individual units working alone. Moreover the ideas can be partially formulated by a member of the group and then refined by the other in a way that both thoughts are absolutely necessary, and in that way the communication itself is an intelligence elevating element.
Many ways of thought merging but not completely as it happens to a person that is just influenced by a way of thought but existing at the same time and colliding too to formulate innovative ideas. This is the meaning and power of collective intelligence, the struggle between cooperation and individuallity that creates great ideas and great creations. In conclusion I believe that the way to fully exploiting collective intelligence is the balance between cooperative and individual or even selfish spirit in a manner where the person asseses the other points of view but also defends his own so there is little possibility that the effective one will be lost.