The Group Mind

The sensory-executive, or sensory-resistive, model of Braziers Park School of Integrative Species Research was developed by founder Norman Glaister, enormously influenced by Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916):

Trotter was the first scientist to explore the psychological differences characterising three species of herd animals and consider their implications… he asserted that humanity’s survival into the future depended on the urgent need for two types of people, whom he termed “resistive” and “unstable”, to effect a way of living and organising society with greater mutual understanding and co-operation.

- Braziers Research Communications 24, fragment, 2003. Braziers Archives.

The School was set up to test Glaister’s model, which originally had two separate groups representing the sensory or unstable and the executive or resistive. Now the sensory group and the executive group are constituted by the same persons, but in different modes:

“In the language of quantum physics, the sensory process should facilitate the overlapping of the wave functions of the group members, strengthening and multiplying the relationships between individuals and eventually leading to the emergence of a larger whole, that is the group mind. It also enables all options to be explored, akin to the quantum superposition of states or virtual transitions, until a decision can be made and one actuality chosen. In quantum terminology, this is the collapse of the wave function. The role of the executive is to approve this actuality and take decisions based upon it. The movement of an issue or idea between the executive committee and the sensory committee parallels the evolutionary process, when possible evolutionary directions are explored at the quantum level as virtual transitions, and eventually one direction is 'chosen' ”

– Penny Pitty, Glaister Lecture, fragment: New Physics and the Group Mind, March 2000. Braziers archives