Hello. My name is Dr. David Pincus. I've never written or responded to a blog before, so let me introduce myself briefly and lay out what I aim to do here. I am an assistant professor at Chapman University in Orange California. I am a clinical psychologist, a generalist, who works with children, families and individual adults. While I have experience working with almost all problem areas and types of people, I suppose my specialty areas would focus on working with teen-agers, working to resolve family conflicts, child weight-loss, and pain management. However, I am not really here to write about clinical topics or self-help per se. Rather, I was approached to write a user-friendly blog about my research, which focuses on nonlinear dynamical systems theory. An editor from Psychology Today heard me speak at a recent (APS) conference in Chicago and invited me to write the blog. Seems my presentation must have been understandable, which can be rare at research conferences, and even rarer when one is into nonlinear dynamics. So, anyway, here we go...
Many of you will have heard of the concepts of: "Chaos Theory" "The Butterfly Effect" or maybe even "Emergence" "Fractals" "Complexity" or "Catastrophe" theories. Each of these is an example of a nonlinear dynamic. Usually when I discuss nonlinear dynamics, even with other researchers, the typical response is a glazed-over expression, followed by a subtle, yet desperate scramble to change the topic of conversation. Indeed, I may not be able to compete with blogs about your cheating spouse, or the best ways to lose a few pounds.
My challenge in this blog will be to make nonlinear dynamics understandable and interesting to you. My experience thus far has been that everything in psychology is a part of a nonlinear system. So we will be able to talk about nearly any topic here. That will help to keep things interesting.
On a broader level, I am going to try to take each of you on an enjoyable trip - from the farthest reaches of your abstract thinking and into a deeper understanding of what is "true" in psychology. At the same time, I am going to try to develop smaller and more concrete "tips" that will help us all to navigate the turbulent waters of our moment-to-moment lives. I am looking forward to this because I rarely get an informal "place" to develop ideas or to reflect on the nonlinear research that I read from others. That said, some of the things I will be writing about will be incomplete, a bit "off," or on rare occasions just wrong. I'll ask for indulgence and forgiveness at the outset.
While almost any topic will work, I am going to focus on topics from my clinical work, research, and teaching at Chapman University: family dynamics, parenting, weight loss, pain, therapy, and conflict. If you choose to join me in this blog, and hopefully respond back and forth with me, we will all come to learn more about the ways that each of these topics is nonlinear, dynamic, and systemic.
Okay - so the first thing to deal with is, "What the heck is a "nonlinear dynamical system?" I typically start by defining each term separately. "Nonlinear" means disproportional change. This means that some small change can lead to a large outcome, some large change can have almost no effect at all, sudden abrupt shifts that seem to come out of nowhere, or complex changes over time, at the extreme high levels of "chaos." In traditional, linear research, the focus is rigidly focused upon proportional change: a little bit of effort leads to a little change, a lot leads to a lot, and so on. Linear relationships in psychological events are rare. And the ones that are out there tend to be so obvious that researchers end up doing lots of work just to "prove" common sense. Any psychology major has experienced reading journal articles full of jargon and statistics and boring writing just to end up saying: "Duh! I could have told you that!"
This is one of the main reasons why most research is so boring - even to other researchers! Because most researchers are simply looking at research where the light is best, when all of the fun and meaningful stuff is happening off in the shadows where things are complex and nonlinear.
Some common examples of disproportional change include: a) when you show affection to your boyfriend and he does not respond, b) when you try to go on a diet and you end up gaining weight; c) when your boss does the smallest thing that drives you completely nuts, or d) when you lose your husband of 20 years and have to move back into the home of your emotionally abusive mother and you are okay, but three weeks later when your cat dies you begin to seriously consider suicide. Think of almost any change that happens in your life and you will find that these changes are nonlinear, small input, big output; big input, no output, extreme rigidity, full blown chaos, and everything else in between.
Artificial things have strait lines: buildings, bridges, roads, and parks. Nature's products are irregular, complex, and nonlinear: in the branching of trees, neurons, bronchial tubes, and interpersonal relationships; in the jagged outlines of clouds, coastlines, and our self-concepts; and in the turbulent flows of water through a rapid, convection cells in the atmosphere, and information exchange during small group discussions. Indeed, the fingerprint of Mother Nature is complex and self-similar across different size frames: her finger-print is fractal.
The second term, "dynamical," is easier to define; it simply means change over time. Of course it is obvious that our lives unfold over time, and in psychological events it is true what they say: "Timing is everything." Yet, again, as crazy as it sounds researchers in psychology very rarely look at how things change over time. Still, all the interesting things depend on timing. You know not to try to talk finances with your husband while he is watching the final game of the NBA playoffs, right? You know that it is hard to start a weight-loss plan right before thanksgiving, right? And you know better than to reprimand your teenager when she has a friend over at your house. Nonlinear dynamical systems theory aims at understanding these specific moments in time, understanding how our lives' momentums are sometimes the most important forces to recon with, far more important than the power of our wills, or any particular effort we may make.
Finally, "systems" refers to a focus on the inter-relationships among multiple factors in our day to day lives. As the saying goes, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Nowhere is this truer than in psychology. Nonlinear dynamical systems research in psychology acknowledges and embraces the fact that the most useful models of our lives will almost always involve the interaction of many moving parts, which together create a new whole. Consciousness is probably the best example of a complex, emergent, system. Any single neuron is just a cell, firing or not firing. Just like ants in a colony, a single neuron is pretty dumb, it is not you, it can't read this blog; neurons are pretty useless in fact. But when you put 100,000,000 of them together, and interlink them with about 10,000 connections each, you create a conscious human mind - capable of imagining the infinite. Right now, picture a purple and yellow polka dotted space bear bathing in a vat of Jello. You can do that right? And if you can imagine that, you can imagine anything. No one has ever imagined that before, and each of you will imagine this space bear a little differently, right? A single neuron can't do that, but a whole bunch of them together can.
