1.- I have this strong belief: that fuzzy ontologies are always a bad symptom.

2.- http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n10/fodo01_.html

Greetings :-)

Unbelievably intelligent and enjoyable read! MIND BLOWING STUFF. My fiance and I have been discussing these findings. Intriguing! I love this post!

I don't know how much of an imagination is good ;-) Scientists do it all the time; however reading it was good fun or even thinking that way :) but obviously we guys are far far away from TRUTH :(

There appears to be a parallel between the wave-particle duality of matter and the manner in which the two brain hemispheres process information. Particles have a definite position while waves have indefinite position expressed in probabilities. The definiteness of particles seems to be reflected in the working of the left hemisphere, which successively analyzes/differentiates details, while the indefiniteness of waves seems to be reflected in the working of the right hemisphere, which simultaneously/intuitively grasps the whole but fuzzes up the details within the whole.

Have you seen the video of neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor depicting her stroke experience? She talks about the difference between the two brain hemispheres and also suggests how they perceive our own individuality differently - the left hemisphere sees our individuality as separate from the environment (solid, firm boundaries) while the right hemisphere blurs the boundaries of things, including our individuality. From the perspective of the right hemisphere our individuality blends with the environment so you feel identified with a greater reality. The video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

This article really steered my thoughts! It's right there on the spot on some issues I've been thinking lately dr David. I personally believe that physics, not only open new ways to psychology, but they are the FUTURE of psychology. What intrigued me the most, was this part

" Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is not unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious."

I have some theories concerning this subject myself :)

I also linked to your article from my homepage. I want to make sure that articles like this one start to get the attention they deserve.

P.S.: Do you have any bibliography to recommend on the subjects you discussed in your article?

Eagerly following your column but not up to speed with the physics.

I am quite keen to understand the Losada experiment that produced the 3:1 to 11:1 positive:negative ratios and wondered if you have done any work on it.

Cheers
Jo

Hi Jo,

I haven't done any work directly on this, but I discuss it in broader theoretical context in my chapter in the book coming out in the next month or two - "Chaos and complexity in Psychology: The theory of nonlinear dynamical systems" so there's a plug for that. Or you can go right to the source and get a copy of: Frederickson, B.L., & Losada, M.F. (2005). Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. American Psychologist, 60(7), 678-686.

Hi Dr. Pincus,

I really enjoyed this post. One book I'm reading and one I've read that might be of interest on this subject:

Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd. It's fascinating stuff, looking at the Universe from a Quantum perspective as an entity that is programming itself. All is information. I haven't finished it yet but it kept me up way too late trying to get my head around the ramifications. BTW, there's a video of Seth speaking on this subject at: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lloyd2/lloyd2_index.html

The Hidden Pattern by Ben Goertzel. Talk about a mind blowing philosophical journey. I believe Dr. Goertzel's a member of SCTPLS and a noted researcher in Artificial General Intelligence. In the Hidden Pattern, Ben looks at a lot of the issues you mention above but, since it's a book, in a lot more depth. Fascinating! I just discovered your blog but I'll be back, thanks for writing it.

Hi Dave.

I hope you are doing well.

This might be pretty unrelated to your blog post...Actually, I have a question and I think it will be great if you would answer the same.

I will appreciate if you would find time.

I read an article from newscientist.com -- excerpt below

"The focus at that time was something called deterministic chaos, in which a small perturbation can lead to a huge change in the system - the famous "butterfly effect". That would make the brain unpredictable but not actually random, because the butterfly effect is a phenomenon of physical laws that do not depend on chance. Researchers built elaborate computational models to test the idea, but unfortunately they did not behave like real brains. "Although the results were beautiful and elegant, models based on deterministic chaos just didn't seem applicable when looking at the human brain," says Karl Friston, a neuroscientist at University College London.

In the 1990s, it emerged that the brain generates random noise, and hence cannot be described by deterministic chaos. When neuroscientists incorporated this randomness into their models, they found that it created systems on the border between order and disorder - self-organised criticality."

Can you please answer the below question?

Isn't self-organized criticality in itself a defaut characteristic of chaos?

If not, then what is deterministic chaos? How is it different from Chaos?

Thank you.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Best,
Neel

Hello again.

:)

Self Organized Criticality.

Flipping in and out of depression-mania, hovering in the zone of lull-high creativity, touching the rock bottom and coming out.

If on the level of neurons in the brain, flipping/tizzy can seemingly increase the overall IQ of a human being, can it be, on a higher level, that ppl. suffering from something like described above (BPD?), can actually be systems flourishing coz of SOC?

Can this be linked to creativity attached to individuals having conditions of Bipolar disporder?

many thanks in advance.
neel

Hi Neel,

My best answer is that I don't know. Perhaps. But there are some gaps, both in the available evidence and in some of the terms and assertions you use in the question - I'm not clear on IQ being linked to any clear-cut neurological process - not that has been discovered yet. I'm not sure what "flipping/tizzy" is. It's not clear yet what the dynamical properties of bipolar DO or depression are yet - but there has been some work done (for a review, you can check out the article by Steve Guastello I referenced in the last reply). Anecdotally, I would not describe mania or depression as in bipolar disorder as flourishing, and the link between creativity and mental illness is not clear yet either - although there is a lot of available research in this area. So ultimately - I think what you're suggesting is possible, but it would be overstretching to go further than that. Neat idea though.

=-Dave

:)
:)
:)

Apolgies for my incoherent choice words. End of the day, I am an IT person trying to understand psychology. lol

context to the thought was:
"The balance between phase-locking and instability within the brain has also been linked to intelligence - at least, to IQ. Last year, Robert Thatcher from the University of South Florida in Tampa made EEG measurements of 17 children, aged between 5 and 17 years, who also performed an IQ test.
e found that the length of time the children's brains spent in both the stable phase-locked states and the unstable phase-shifting states correlated with their IQ scores. For example, phase shifts typically last 55 milliseconds, but an additional 1 millisecond seemed to add as many as 20 points to the child's IQ. A shorter time in the stable phase-locked state also corresponded with greater intelligence - with a difference of 1 millisecond adding 4.6 IQ points to a child's score"

Sorry, should have been clearer in my reference. And I do understand that it is just some research result.

hmmmm I think you are right in saying that with so many uncertainties, the probability of a concrete answer, diminishes (in this context).

Dr. Pincus, again, thanks one ton for your time.

Have a good evening.

neel

Hi Neel,

I found the original article you were working from here - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227141.200-disorderly-genius-how...

It helped a lot to have the context. I'm totally 'down' with the results of the Cambridge group (Kitzbichler et al. 2009, attributed in the on-line article for some reason to Bullmore). In fact, I was planning to do my next blog on their results, but maybe I'll skip that now as we've covered in and then some here between the two of us :) The results of the Thatcher (the IQ stuff) I'm a little more hesitent to buy in to without getting more context. I don't have access to the journal these results were published in, so I haven't read this article yet. But the idea that IQ is so strongly related to phase locking vs. phase shifting among large scale neural networks would be a very incredible result. So incredible I'm skeptical. The fact that it is not in a better journal adds to my skepticism. OTOH - it very well could be. And on a positive note, I wouldn't be surprised. Finding out that the brain works at the edge of chaos is just the start for sure... And the types of results that follow that and similar conclusions will surely solve a lot of problems that ordinary science could not.

Thanks a lot for the fun!

-Dave