It would be interesting to apply this in a risk management context. Seed Magazine explains how Ants and Neurons are related:

Choosing a new home, or house hunting, is the most complicated decision an ant colony makes. When an ant nest is overcrowded or damaged, scout ants begin searching for a new building site by making independent evaluations of different spots and reporting back to the colony. A decision is made when a “quorum” is reached, when a certain number of ants agree on a location.

This same process occurs among neurons in a monkey’s visual cortex when the animal performs a visual discrimination task. In the task, a monkey is flashed an image of dots moving in different directions and must decide which way the majority of them are going. When the image appears, neurons in the monkey’s visual cortex gather bits of information from the monkey’s eyes, much like ants evaluating a nest site. As more data is gathered, the neurons with the correct answer gradually increase their firing rate. When their activity reaches a certain threshold level, the monkey makes a decision.

This is an excellent metaphor for managing security operations through the use of numerous simple data points/feeds rather than trying to build just a few very intelligent sensors. It’s the opposite of the traditional ingress/egress control suite of products and more like total awareness engineering. Correlation of all the host antimalware data with internal network behavior analysis for example would be a rich source of decision-making material.