L\'evy flights in human behavior and cognition

TL;DR

This paper reviews evidence that Le9vy flights describe human mobility and mental search behaviors, suggesting an evolutionarily ancient neural basis and broad implications across disciplines.

Contribution

It synthesizes recent findings showing Le9vy flights in human behavior and cognition, proposing a common underlying pattern with evolutionary and neural implications.

Findings

Human mobility follows Le9vy flight patterns

Mental searches in online gambling also exhibit Le9vy flights

Suggests ancient brain regions govern this behavior

Abstract

L\'evy flights represent the best strategy to randomly search for a target in an unknown environment, and have been widely observed in many animal species. Here, we inspect and discuss recent results concerning human behavior and cognition. Different studies have shown that human mobility can be described in terms of L\'evy flights, while fresh evidence indicates that the same pattern accounts for human mental searches in online gambling sites. Thus, L\'evy flights emerge as a unifying concept with broad cross-disciplinary implications. We argue that the ubiquity of such a pattern, both in behavior and cognition, suggests that the brain regions responsible for this behavior are likely to be evolutionarily old (i.e. no frontal cortex is involved), and that fMRI techniques might help to confirm this hypothesis.