Cracking the black box: SCIoI’s Jens Krause on what it really takes to work across disciplines

By: Maria Ott

When Science of Intelligence first began, not every conversation went smoothly. Jens Krause, SCIoI PI and behavioral biologist remembers preparing a talk on anticipation in fish. Before he could even start, a spirited debate broke out between two colleagues, carrying on until his time was gone. “At first I was frustrated,” he says, “later I realized it was a sign of how eager everyone was to connect their own perspectives.”

Moments like these showed how challenging it could be to work across disciplines, and how much there was to gain from it. Finding the right words, learning to see through someone else’s discipline lens, took patience. Yet that effort often opened new doors, exposing hidden assumptions and shedding light on the kinds of mechanisms that usually remained locked away in the black box.

That first experience was one of many. The sparks and the clashes, the misunderstandings and the breakthroughs, together they marked the road toward mutual understanding and later on to the development of candidate principles of intelligence, combining insights from twelve disciplines. For Jens, who had spent his career studying collective animal behavior, SCIoI was a chance to experience what happens when scientists themselves form a collective. It was as much about learning how to communicate as it was about the science itself.

From childhood puzzles to collective intelligence

Jens’s comfort with this kind of cross-talk began long before SCIoI. As a teenager, he was nudged into mathematics by his older brother Stefan, now a computer scientist. “Despite my obvious lack of talent, he was patient,” Jens recalls. “Later, when I studied biology, he insisted I learn computer languages and graph theory.” Those early exchanges taught him something crucial: if you want someone in another field to care about your problem, you have to reframe it so that it becomes their problem too.

That skill—translation—became central at SCIoI. “Interdisciplinarity isn’t just about explaining your work,” he says. “You have to phrase it in a way that lets others actually build on it. That often means you need to understand your own ideas more deeply than you normally would.”

Cracking the black box

In his work on animal cognition, Jens often faced a similar frustration: researchers could measure inputs and outputs (what stimulus an animal received and the behavior that followed), but the mechanisms in between remained mysterious. The significant part, the processing itself, was locked away. “Everything that was really interesting was always in the black box,” he says.

At SCIoI, the approach was different. Instead of debating definitions of intelligence, researchers were tasked with building systems—an algorithm, a model, a robotic system—that showed how information was actually transformed. “You have to identify an input, a mechanism by which information is processed, and then specify an output that solves a problem in the real world,” Jens explains. For him, that shift was liberating: it replaced speculation with something you could build, test, and watch come to life.

That shift sharpened theories, and it also transformed his fieldwork. Collaborations with computer scientists allowed him to track fish shoals in the open ocean using drones, revealing collective patterns never seen before. A lecture by cognitive psychologist Marcel Brass opened another path, sparking a project on collective rule-breaking that Jens pursued with sociologist Anne Nassauer and theoretical biologist Pawel Romanczuk. Together they produced a landmark paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Science as a social practice

What stands out to Jens about SCIoI are the moments of being together. Hours spent in discussion, arguing over diagrams, puzzling through misunderstandings, sometimes ending in sudden clarity, often spilling over into informal gatherings after internal events.

“Spending time together in person was crucial,” Jens reflects. “No number of Zoom calls or emails can replace that. It’s in those informal moments that you begin to grow an understanding of how other people think, and that pushes the science forward more than anything else.”

He came to see accessibility as just as important as expertise, the colleagues who could be approached on the spot often became the most creative partners. Over time, these everyday interactions built trust, dissolved barriers, and gave rise to a culture where complex ideas could flow across fields. “After a while, you just start communicating differently,” he says. “You can see ideas moving across boundaries.”

Cracking interdisciplinarity itself

For Jens, interdisciplinarity has always carried its own black box. Everyone can see the disciplines entering and the discoveries emerging, but the real mechanisms, the clashes, the trust-building, the shifts in language, usually stay invisible. At SCIoI, those hidden processes began to leave cracks in the box, letting ideas move more freely across boundaries. “After a while, you just start communicating differently,” Jens says. “And you can see ideas moving across disciplines.”

For him, it is in those cracks that the future of science takes shape: “SCIoI is quite simply the best thing that has ever happened to me in my scientific career.”

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