What Zebrafish Embryos and Surfers Teach Us About Asymmetry and the Aviation Industry

I was fortunate to spend New Year’s Day at the beach in Nicaragua this year. While sitting quietly and watching the sunlight sparkle across gentle lapping waves I had a thought, a theory began to form in my mind. The water cast shifting hues of turquoise and deep blue across my peripheral vision. When I entered the sea, the motion of the waves moved my body subtly but persistently, drawing me forward and back in a rhythm I did not consciously choose. I was being moved by the waves in a synchronous motion.

To my right, a small group of surfers waited, boards aligned, watching patiently for the next rideable swell. They all clustered and seemed to move as one system. As many do at the beginning of the New year, I began to reflect on how often human behavior, particularly collective group behavior, appears to move in waves. Traffic patterns, hub and spoke systems, travel decisions, crowd dynamics, even demand surges in aviation often emerge suddenly, propagate rapidly, and dissipate unevenly, sometimes without an obvious central cause.

This all raised a question in my mind, are these patterns incidental, or are they a natural consequence of how humans think, decide, and move through complex systems?

Patterned Behavior in Human Collective Systems

Anyone who has spent time observing traffic flows on your way to work or school knows this phenomenon. Some days, roads are inexplicably quiet; on others, congestion seems to materialize everywhere at once. These patterns are not always explained by school holidays, bank holidays, or known events. Instead, they appear as collective behavioral alignments, as if a distributed population had responded to a shared but unspoken signal. I sometimes find myself on the roads observing these patterns and thinking its like there was a secret memo issued and everyone but me read it. Collective human activity often exhibits similar rhythmic, clustered characteristics that are not always straightforward to explain. Over the years in analysis, I've often seen elements in aviation mirror these tendencies, for example passenger bookings surged in pulses, airports experience episodic congestion, and network-wide stress builds in waves rather than gradual ramps. If you study the hub and spoke systems such as the hub of Americas in Panama you will see clear, wave patterns in network planning with peaks and troughs through the day and night. I was once handling a series of charter flights and the arrival of staggered buses in waves were out of synch with our speed of check-in and the waves of passengers literally crashed in on top of us in their several thousands. We were essentially swamped and under water. The terminal swelled and heaved with thousands of passengers that looked for all intents and purposes like cells working in a single organism- the crowd.

Conventional factors such as calendars, public holidays, pricing mechanisms, marketing and capacity limits, only partially account for these behaviors in my view. I've spend years at airports and observed what appears to be a deeper driver that points towards some kind of collective behavioral alignment, in which individuals respond to subtle perceived signals, shared expectations, and the visible actions of others. This alignment generates coherent system-level patterns that emerge spontaneously, without central orchestration. Low cost airlines tap into this by acute use of social media and thereby, capturing attention and creating a social proof phenomenon.

So what does this teach us in a practical sense, how can we apply this to good effect? To grasp these phenomena, I believe analysis would be well served by shifting from looing at isolated individual decisions toward system-level descriptions that incorporate interaction, feedback loops, and nonlinearity. The key here is non-linearity. I will now move on to how geometry plays an important role in asymmetric patterns and rather than scale with entropy, it results in a highly scaled complex coordinated system that is highly organized and well designed.

Lessons we can draw from Biological Pattern Formation

Developmental biology can provide some illuminating parallels. I was looking through recent research by Nikhil Mishra, Yuting I. Li, Edouard Hannezo, and Carl-Philipp Heisenberg (published in Nature Physics, 2026) which, reveals how the geometry of zebrafish embryos orchestrates asymmetric cell divisions and coordinates cell-cycle timing. Coordinated developmental patterns arise without any central controller; instead, local interactions and geometric constraints reliably produce large-scale organization. Early embryogenesis unfolds through mitotic phase waves, in which cells transition between resting and dividing states in synchronized, propagating fronts. These waves rely on biochemical signaling governed by thresholds and local coupling. The system is intrinsically asymmetric, minor differences in geometry or timing can lead to markedly divergent outcomes. Much like a slight divergent angle of barely a degree could take an aircraft thousands of kilometers off course over a transoceanic flight over time. This of course is countered by constant course correction on the flight controls and state of the art instruments.

So why am I talking about zebrafish embryos and geometry in the aviation context. Well, an insight I think this offers is that the significance of this work is its inferred demonstration that complex, robust coordination can emerge from simple local rules operating under asymmetric conditions.

Excitable Media and Wave Propagation

The mathematical and conceptual thread that ties these observations together is the theory of excitable media. Such systems comprise elements that remain quiescent until a stimulus exceeds a critical threshold, at which point they activate, enter a refractory (recovery) period, and become temporarily unresponsive. This basic architecture generates robust, directional, and scalable propagating waves. Here I am talking about thresholds again, and anyone familiar with my earlier work will know how much I am fascinated by the concept and potential of thresholds, especially in consciousness and brain wave formations.

Excitable dynamics have long been studied in physical reactions, chemical oscillations, and biological tissues. They also help explain human-scale phenomena, such as the Mexican wave that sweeps through stadium crowds when spectators react only to their immediate neighbors, or the stop-and-go waves that travel backward through dense highway traffic following minor perturbations as I mentioned in the opening of this article. Years in the industry leads me to believe that aviation networks too, exhibit strikingly analogous behavior. When a local disruption occurs, whether weather, mechanical, or procedural, delays propagate rapidly through tightly interconnected schedules, crew rotations, passenger connections, and air traffic control constraints, producing widespread effects reminiscent of wave phenomena in excitable systems. Its the old knock on effect in simple terms, but lets examine what deeper aspects are at play that may serve useful in everything from marketing campaigns to airport infrastructure and network planning.

Human Cognition as an Asymmetric Pattern-Forming Process

While excitable media describe physical and biological propagation, they can further be complemented by an understanding of cognition. Edward de Bono’s seminal insights into asymmetric thinking offer a useful perspective here, in that human thought is not primarily logical and linear but pattern-forming and self-reinforcing. And what's good for the goose is good for the gander, in other words what drives thinking also naturally drives behavior. Once established, cognitive patterns stabilize and perpetuate themselves, often persisting beyond rational justification. And of course thinking patterns, including emotional behavior patterns drive behavior, and of course that means passenger and consumer behavior. So we are getting to the bases for causal systems in our industry consumer behavior at a more fundamental level.

In this framework, I propose that the brain acts as a self-organizing system, channeling information along entrenched pathways. Small provocations can sometimes elicit outsized responses, while alternative patterns require deliberate effort to emerge. This asymmetry underlies the rapid convergence of populations toward shared behaviors, beliefs, and expectations, even absent explicit coordination. It holds some possibility for understanding the rational versus irrational behaviors we see or even the reasonably unreasonable actions of people manifesting on flights, and airports across the globe.

Applied to collective contexts, asymmetric cognition illuminates how weak signals, media narratives, social cues, or perceived norms can trigger large-scale behavioral waves. Travel decisions, booking surges, and airport arrival patterns reflect not only objective conditions but also propagating shared mental models. Dare I say it, even civil unrest can occur in this way.

Aviation as a Socio-Technical Excitable System

Integrating these perspectives into the aviation context reveals itself as what I would call a socio-technical excitable system shaped by both hard physical constraints and fluid cognitive dynamics. Of course fluid dynamics are very useful to study closely, as they can influence everything from traffic flow designs or even cash flows in a business. Passenger flows, and airport architecture are all part of this ecology. Even demand often arrives in fits and bursts or waves rather than steady flows. Disruptions cascade asymmetrically instead of dissipating evenly. Part of the work here is designing ways of improving efficiency and understanding how recovery follows refractory periods dictated by infrastructure, regulation, and human capacity.

Traditional aviation planning excels at optimizing for average conditions, yet historical analysis and average-based weighted approaches can struggle with the threshold-driven, burst wavelike reality of operations. Wave-based and asymmetric models, by contrast, naturally describe how local perturbations amplify, propagate, and eventually decay across global networks. What I am saying here is that this reframing recasts familiar challenges, hub congestion, delay cascades, passenger misconnections, and asset imbalances as inevitable consequences of a highly coupled behavioral system.

Implications for Forecasting, Management, and Design

If wave dynamics and asymmetric cognition can impact on aviation systems at varying degrees and levels, then forecasting, management, and design could evolve further to take this into account. Volatility should no longer be dismissed as mere noise; early deviations must be treated as potential trigger points. Interventions prove most effective when applied upstream, before waves fully develop and spread. I refer to this as paddling for the surf as it forms. Waves have clear characteristics and signals. Surfers are experts at reading the signs in the ocean and paddling ahead of the threshold and catching it at the right time. Our industry can do the same. How so? Well, the idea is that network architecture could potentially benefit from intentional asymmetry that curbs amplification rather than pursuing uniform efficiency at all costs. Afterall we want the zebrafish tail at the back and not in the place of the head if it is to flow through the water efficiently! At airports as well as in air traffic control, examining passenger and aircraft flows as potentially excitable media encourages designs that absorb congestion rather than reflect it onward. Fleet management gains from strategies that respect recovery periods and accommodate burst demand, enhancing resilience without wasteful redundancy. I am not just talking about the demand created by flash sales or a major concert in a city, but something more embedded in the very elements of human behavior. My aim in presenting these ideas in this context of course, is not suggest that we supplant established tools in network planning and operations research. Rather I believe they could enrich them by embedding human behavior and cognition directly into the system model and our assumptions toolkit. This would be an adjunct to all the other disciplines that are at play in route and network planning and I do not suggest for a second that it would replace those time tested methods. But it does account for some of the outlier effects we see in the wild, and help us form models that are effective for planning and preparation.

The insight I am attempting to impart here or the theory is that waves constitute a universal mode of organization across nature, society, and technology. Cells divide in waves, crowds surge in waves, traffic pulses in waves, and human cognition forms patterns asymmetrically. As vast human–machine networks, aviation systems are no exception, after all they are designed and built by humans forming brain waves in the process to do so. If I learned something from the prolific author and teacher Edward de Bono, its that progress lies not in suppressing patterns but in understanding their formation and learning to redirect them. When fused with the physics of excitable media and the biology of asymmetric development, this insight yields a potent framework for reimagining aviation demand, flow, and asset management. It of course comes into effect when looking at social media campaigns and how they are designed, as they effectively cause the coupling or proximate neighbor effect via the hand held devices that are ever more omnipresent. We need to better understand and fundamentals of asymmetry and wave dynamics as intrinsic features, rather than operational defects and in this way the industry can progress toward systems that are robustly adaptive, resilient, and harmonized with the realities of human behavior. They may even help detect early stage signals for a shockwave forming that the industry can surf rather than have it crash down upon our heads and bury us in the swim.

I hope you found this insightful, and Happy New Year to all our readers and subscribers.

Noel Cox

References

N. Mishra, Y.I. Li, E. Hannezo & C.P. Heisenberg. 2025. Geometry-driven asymmetric cell divisions pattern cell cycles and zygotic genome activation in the zebrafish embryo. Nature Physics. DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-03122-1

De Bono, E. (1994). Parallel thinking: From Socratic thinking to de Bono thinking. Viking.

De Bono, E. (1985). Six Thinking Hats. Little, Brown, & Company (or Penguin Books)