The Chaotic Life

Complexity, Coherence, and Halloween

Dr. David Pincus — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:41:52 +0000

This week I had the pleasure of being contacted by a reporter from the Orange County Register (our local paper) with the question: "Q: Why do so many people enjoy going to scary movies, or putting themselvesin scary situations?"

Such a fun question, I figured it was blog-worthy. Below is my un-edited response. Hopefully, he will use a line or two that works for his purposes. More likely, I (ironically) scared him away for good. Perhaps it will add something to your Halloween experience, or scare you away too. Either way...
Nearly every theory of personality can provide an answer to this question, "Why do we like to be scared?" In my opinion each "theory" contributes a piece of the overall puzzle, which when put together can shed some light on the simple question about the paradoxical joy of Halloween, and also some of the suprisingly coherent properties that connect each of us across scales, from biological to cultural, and across both time and space.

Starting at the smallest scale, on a biological level each person has his or her own distinct level of baseline arousal. This is the level of stimulation in our nervous system when we are at rest. Some people are more "amped up." Others are "under-aroused." Paradoxially, the underaroused people are the ones most likely to enjoy scary movies, as well as motorcycle rides, tatoos and piercings, roller-coasters, gambling, recreational drugs, playing contact sports, and so on. One source of motivation for thrillseekers is their low level of resting physiological arousal. Being underaroused is uncomfortable; and they will describe it as a special kind of antsy boredome. Incidentally, I am one of these folks and as such I love both Halloween and also horror films, the nastier the better. Ironically, folks like us find the effects calming. Again it is paradoxical. Thrilling information from the environment ramps us up to a more comfortable level.

People who are high in baseline arousal (e.g. my wife) tend to avoid such activities. These are your more mild mannered folks, apple bobbing, friendly costumes, passing out the candy while enjoying a good book, a warm fire, and a warm beverage at home - this is their cup of decafeinated tea. They are naturally ramped up, so feel more comfortable with low stimulation information from the environment. Incidentally, people's baseline levels of arousal tend to increase with age, and I believe there is a general difference between men and women (men are lower), helping to explain why younger males would be the primary audience for these types of films and for Halloween mischeif.
Levels of baseline arousal are neither good nor bad - it depends upon how people learn to accommodate. Some sensation-seeking individuals will raise their levels of arousal by working hard in stressful environments (e.g., fire-fighters), by playing sports, or through recreational gambling. On the other hand, research has demonstrated that psychopaths and violent criminals (even serial killers) have a tendency toward lower baseline arousal. Thus, the intesity of their crimes actually make them feel calmer. In my clinical work, I once came across a juvinile offender who increasingly sought out higher and higher levels of stimulation - moving from small-scale fire-setting, to blowing up public property, to eventually robbing a store using a sawed-off shotgun while on LSD. We therapists who became involved were of little help. We couldn't find anything wrong with the young man, or his family, who appeared as the pillars American Lifestyle. It was the forensic investigators who got to the bottom of things.

Incidentally, most people would find the LSD by itself to be way too much stimulation, or would survive the "trip" in a more common manner - with low lighting, a bean-bag chair, and some Almond Brothers albums (for example). Indeed, this young man's sexual response became linked to these events, providing an extra boost of arousal and excitement to situations that would send the rest of us hiding and shaking under a blanket somewhere. This process of linking similar arousing bio-emotional phenomena is quite common - helping to explain why serial killers so often sexualize their crimes - e.g., Jeffrey Dahmer was said to have kept the severed head of a victim in his work locker at Briggs and Stratton for the purpose of ongoing sexual stimulation when he was briefly in work-release county jail in Milwaukee for some minor offense. They should have put that in the movie (Dahmer, 2002) about him. Thus ends the scary part of this blog.

On a MUCH milder note - the same process occurs with healthy attraction and stimulation that provides increased arousal. This is why roller coasters, the tops of Ferris Wheels, and of course scary movies are ideal situations for early romance-building. One key facet to attraction is increased physiological arousal. As such, courters will typically misconstrue or comingle the titilation of a scary film with fatuous feelings for a dating partner - so long as the film is not too gross or upsetting (e.g., I would not recommend Hostel II for a first date).

The other personality theories - behavioral, cognitive, trait-oriented, and psychodynamic each may be arranged heirarchically - explaining larger-scale personality factors, above and beyond the biological level. What ties them all together is the concept of balance. For example, research on moral development suggests that individuals implicitly keep a moral balance sheet in the back of their mind's, informing their decisions over time. This can help explain small paradoxes such as the diet coke with pizza syndrome, as well as larger paradoxes like Bill Clinton's sex scandal.
Jung's analytic theory is one of the broadest, vaguest, and most difficult to research of these balance-oriented personality theories. Yet, Jung's thinking can broaden and and deepen ones understanding of our motivation to be scared. Jung suggested that everyone has a persona - the face they put on for the world, and also a shadow-side - the darker more hidden aspects of personality that run counter to the persona. The two sides run in balance to one another, such that the bigger one's persona becomes, the larger is the shadow that is cast. Again, recall any of the recent or past moral scandals of beloved religious and political figures from American Culture for examples of this dynamic.

When considered in this regard, scary movies may allow people to project themselves into the films, perhaps in the role of the "monster" or simply through an observer role - the passive voyeur to horrible things. I suspect that few identify exclusively with the victim, and less so with the first victim (i.e., in a slasher film). It is possible that this type of experience may not only balance some people's physiology, in a relatively non-harmful manner (i.e., the world of graphic make-believe trauma), but may also balance their psyche's as their shadow-sides have the opportunity to experience great and terrible darkness. Indeed, many of us horror fans enjoy the experience of being shocked to the point of our own discomfort, where we must remind ourselves that the film is not real, or to the point that we experience dissonance at the fact that we are viewing it. I had one such experience sitting solo in a horror film (again - Hostel II, truly horrible and embarassing film to view) as a new father and solo middle aged man who snuck out for a break from nigh feedings and over the top positive fatherly contributions in my role as husband and father. I looked a few rows down and saw a young couple, I recognized her as a teen-aged check out girl from my local grocery store in the same mall as the theater. Oh shame on them! (I thought to myself). What's wrong with them? I was mildly frightened walking out, as I imagined the darkness in the hearts of my fellow theater-goers. And all the while, supressed shame for my own attendance, balanced with something quite positive and helpful.

Through experiences such as these, one may gain a healthy balance at various scales of personality, from physiology up to the broadest reaches of their psyche. Of course, for those rare individuals who are in more fragile circumstances, who are well out of balance and prone to some type of violent thrill addiction - violent horror films would not be healthy. I would contend, however, that the vast majority of these very rare individuals would become violent without regard to any influence of horror films.
Jung also had a lot to say about the common themes and the common role of myth, ritual, and the sacred in human lives and culture. I would suggest that from this perspective, horror films may provide a rather sick, yet familiar balance within our culture. Just as football plays a simular to the ancient gladiators of the colleseums, and raves are similar to ancient mystery cults from ancient Greece and Rome, horror films are like the ancient sacrificial rituals from our ancestors. The ancient Myans went into the jungles to hunt for human sacrifices to the Sun, in order to ensure the health of their crops and protection from disease. In the name of such "progress," they cruely committed small-scale genocides to the more indiginous people's of the forest, all in the name of large-scale balance, sending thier heads bouncing down the steps of those grand pyramids. Then, on an even grander scale, the Spaniards arrived and committed even larger attrocities. By the way, I am no cultural scholar, but was out sick the other day and saw Apocolypto on cable. Talk about a scary horror film, wrapped around the hack Mel Gibson motife of a man's revenge for brutality to mother and child (see every film he has ever made from Mad Max on). There's likely some sort of balance in there too, particularly when one considers includes the alcoholism and antisemetic remarks in this film-maker's experience. It was, in my opinion, still one heck of a horror film. Glad I got to see it without paying out of pocket.

Horror films, on the grandest scale, are likely a balancing act within our culture as a whole, a means of sacrifice to our dark pagan ancestry. They are likely a recent branch of a longstanding human ritual, which attempts to control one manifestation of the world's barbaric cruelty, and thereby come closer to understanding it. These modern rituals allow us to leave the dark terror of the theater with a renewed appreciation for life's parallel wonders and beauties.

Indeed, Halloween more broadly is the remaining branch of the pagan rituals that came before it. It is a ritual we have heald on to for strong and complex sets of reasons, and that we have woven into our current traditions - and it is stronger than ever, even in this time of global-society and mind-bending human achievement. Halloween provides the human balance we collectively require, from the hormones in our bodies all the way up through our multifaceted cultural dynamics. I see it as no coincidence that "All Hallows Eve" arives along with "All Saints Day." Each serves to balance the other. In modern times, Halloween cleans our bodies, our minds and our spirits, and prepares us for the coming of traditions of goodness - like Thankgiving, Christmas (and other holidays), and the New Year. All are reflections of the cycles of balance, small to large, in space, in time, in size, and in life.

Resources on Nonlinear Science in Psychology

Dr. David Pincus — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:51:42 +0000

As someone new to blogging, I have at least two faults. (1) my posts are too long; (2) I don't provide links and other references very well. To remedy both, for anyone who has landed at this post, you may enjoy www.societyforchaostheory.org There you will find: links to other on-line web-sites and resources, book recommendations, on-line tutorials on various topics in nonlinear science in psychology, a new blog that we have been test driving and are about to officially launch (in the coming week), information about our annual US and international conferences, access to a listserve linking you to many of the top nonlinear science researchers from around the world, and if so inclined the opportunity to join the society.

Have Fun,

Dr. Dave

Fractal Brains: Fractal Thoughts

Dr. David Pincus — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 05:18:09 +0000

Researchers from the University of Cambridge took a big step forward this year in understanding how our brains work. It seems that the brain has a fractal organization. This likely gives us much of what we consider human. And at a deeper level these findings may help to connect us in a very fundamental way to the rest of the natural world.

The research team of Kitzbichler, Smith, Christensen, and Bullmore published their results in an article called "Broadband Criticality of Human Brain Network Synchronization," which is available on-line for free. I've had the article for about six months and had been meaning to post something on it. So at the outset I'd like to thank "Neel" for getting me going to actually re-read the article and post something with an interesting question he posed about neurological complexity and intelligence to the Chaotic Life blog at Psychology Today last month. I'd also like to thank my friend and colleague from NY, Grant Brenner for alerting me to the article when it first came out.

The design, results and context for this study are very sophisticated, and the implications are quite abstract. So I'm going to do my best to be clear. First the context: Many natural systems exhibit fractal organization and behavior. A fractal is a branchlike structure. Think of a tree: (1) Trees have many more small branches than large ones. This characteristic is also sometimes called a "power-law" or "inverse power law" or a "1/f" organization. Each of these terms means that there are exponentially more small branches compared to big ones. (2) Trees are "self-similar," meaning that small branching patterns resemble larger ones. This characteristic is also sometimes called "scale invariance" or "scale free" because no matter the size you are looking at, the general branching shape is the same. (3) The complexity of tree branching patterns can be quantified. Fractals are called "fractals" because they exist in fractional dimensions. A line fits perfectly in one-dimension. A plane (like a piece of paper) fits in two-dimensions. Fractals fit in between a line and a plane (or in the real world between two and three dimensions). More simply, because they are so complex, with huge numbers of tini tiny branches, trees never quite reach three dimensions. If you put them in a box, there will always be some space left over.

You may quickly recognize that many other natural structures besides trees are fractals: Neurons, rivers, the respiratory system, the circulatory system, geological fault lines, snow-flakes, and so on.

Natural systems also produce fractal behavior over time or in dynamics. Earthquakes are a common example. There are many more small earthquakes than large ones (which is nice by the way). Other examples include the size of extinction events in animal species, numbers of academic publications (a few researchers do huge amounts of work and the rest of us do just a little), numbers of hits to web-sites, wait times in stop-and-go traffic, and word usage in literature (i.e., zipf's law).

Why do systems do this? There are many reasons. Essentially, fractal systems have many opportunities for growth, change and re-organization. Yet they also are very robust. They maintain their coherence; they hold together well, even under tough circumstances. They are balanced in this respect, between order and chaos. They are simple, yet also very complex. This balance is often referred to as "criticality," thus the title of the article: "Broadband Criticality." And the term "self-organized" is often added because systems tend to become fractal on their own, simply by putting a lot of system components together and allowing them to exchange information. Think of a party. All you need to do is come up with enough people at the same place and time and they will start to form complex patterns of connection with one another.

Self-organizing critical systems are also very good at connecting, both internally and also to other surrounding systems. The branches of a tree are connected in a very lovely way. If you shake one branch, you'll see broad shaking across the tree. Fractal structures hang together nicely. Yet they branches may be trimmed without affecting the overall structure. Indeed, if you trim them far enough out (above the growth bud, "post-traumatic growth" or "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger") they will often grow even stronger, with more complex connections in the outer branches. Finally, branchlike patterns easily connect to other systems - a literal web of life. A tree with many fractal branches (and also roots) can better connect to the sun (and soil) to gather and exchange life sustaining nutrients.

In the past 10 to 20 years, researchers in psychology have been finding increasing examples of fractal patterns across each of the domains of psychology: Including intentional behaviors, visual search, and speech patterns. In my own lab within the past few years we have found that interpersonal relationships are organized as fractals and most recently that the self-concept is a fractal, with complexity being associated with health in both the psychological and social domains. Furthermore, it appears that fractal complexity (or rigidity) is routinely exchanged among biological, psychological and social processes. Fractal personality structure helps us to grow and connect, as do fractal relationships, and each likely has direct influences on physical health by encouraging integration and flexibility among circulatory, respiratory, and immune systems.

The study by Kitzbichler et al (2008) has added to much prior research suggesting that the brain exhibits fractal behavior. This makes a necessary link between the physical processes of the brain and each of the larger scale fractals we see in broader personality and social relationships. It is clear that biological, psychological and social dynamics are highly interlinked across scales, each impacting the other over time in myriad ways. With fractal organization at each of these scales, one may propose that they in some respects they are all part of the same fractal tree so to speak.

Kitzbichler et al (2008) used two measures of synchronization across brain systems: (1) the "phase-lock interval" and the "lability of global synchronization." The phase-lock interval is the amount of time that different brain regions are doing the same thing together - the amount of time in which they are synchronized. Essentially, this is a time-based measure of brain system coordination. The other measure, "lability of global synchronization" is a space-based measure. This measure tells you how global are the shifts in brain system synchronization, how broad are they, how far reaching.

Leaving out the many wonderful technical details of their analyses, they found that both measures showed clear-cut fractal patterning. This means that the amount of time that different brain regions spend in sync is branchlike - with many short linkage times and fewer long ones. And the spread of these linkages across brain regions was branchlike too, with many small spreads and few large ones.

These results, along with the evidence that has come before them, provide a much truer picture of how the brain is organized and how it works. Such is the core of basic research. The applications of these results may be considered to be virtually unlimited, and will over time impact every branch of applied neuroscience - intelligence, consciousness, empathy, body-mind medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy.

What I would prefer to speculate upon instead would be the broader implications. Indeed what these robust results within the brain suggest is a possible mechanism for the "Broadband Connectivity" we share with the rest of the natural world. Inasmuch as fractal dynamics in broadband synchronization exist at every scale of measurable reality - from quantum to cosmic, perhaps human consciousness is both simply and profoundly a portal through which such fractal connectivity flows. Perhaps the linkages that so effect our growth and integration at the biopsychosocial scales extend much deeper into the roots of matter, and much farther into the cosmos than modernist science has ever imagined. Science appears to be nearing a period of neo-vitalism, with scientifically grounded ways of exploring the attractive worldview of our root-civilizations - that everything in life is connected and that all of the universe is alive within these connections.

Sure - some connections are more proximal than others. Kitzbichler et al. found that functionally connected brain regions were more likely to find and stay in sync with one another for longer periods of time, yielding fractal complexity measures that were less flexible than the connections among more distant regions. Similarly, one's life-partner will be more likely to drive you crazy than the moon.

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if certain systemic states encourage coherence, magnifying the connections among apparently separate systems. For example, the human stress response is a likely candidate for increasing the short-term coherence among biological, psychological and social processes. When you are stressed, your bodily systems band together, your psychological systems become clear and focused, and your social dynamics become coherent as well as you band together and form strict leadership hierarchies. Does human stress have broader impacts? Can their effect be measured even as far as the quantum realm? Conversely, can quantum systems become "stressed" leading them to reach into our macro world? Maybe so, maybe not. One thing is for sure, this blog is already way to long and abstract to fully consider these possibilities. Perhaps another day..?

Time...again: The meaning of time scales in biopsychosocial health

Dr. David Pincus — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:11:18 +0000

Somehow, I think my last posting, an essay on time didn't make it to the recent blogs list. A glitch likely. So I'm going to stay on the topic of time, and keep it short in case anyone wants to look back at that one ("On Time"). The here and now is very trendy in psyc these days (i.e., mindfulness - expanding one's non-evaluative awareness of the here and now). So I'll write about the here and now. I'm sitting listening to a talk on systems biology at an interesting conference out in a small rustic retreat somewhere in Minnesota. This is a sponsored invite only conference (around 50 people) designed to bring complementary alternative medicine (CAM) people together with complexity researchers, a very cool idea. We've got a bunch of real high level researchers and practitioners here, from physics through biology and up to the scale of psychology.

I wanted to speculate briefly on some interesting research methods presented by C-K Peng who presented last night (and with whom I followed up at breakfast and who I'm sitting next to at the moment). What C-K has been working on is examinging the complexity in physiological data over time (i.e., heart-rate variability, small movements in balance during standing) to assess health - "balance" in a non-metaphoric sense. What he has found is that consistency, or balance, in complexity across different time-scales helps to predict risk of heart attack, frailty in old age, and other broadband health outcomes (potentially). Sure enough, we are finding similar results at the psychological and social levels as well.

It seems that there is a common principle in life - flexibility = health. But beyond that, integration across time-scales is key too. When parts of ourselves become disconnected to other parts in time, dis-ease (imbalances) may occur - as those parts become isolated and stagnant. Perhaps it is an experience in memory, cut off from the flows of your day to day life. Perhaps it is some aspect of your "right now" experience (like the talk I am currently ignoring and rudely blogging during). Perhaps your heart is not in sync with your breath for some reason. Perhaps my achilles tendon is growing tighter as the rest of my physical flexibility is increasing (e.g., leading to lower back pain). Perhaps your romantic relationship is out of step with your growth as an individual.

So what can we do? Essentially, this type of research can be used immediately simply by reminding us to be mindful of such imbalances, such disintegrations. Simply noticing that you are drifting from your loved one(s) can help. If you are becoming more rigid (i.e., more restricted and repetetive - e.g., obsessive or ruminative), then reach out to more flexible relations with others. If you are growing (i.e., becoming more flexible), then reach out to grow your relationships in step. On the physio level, notice your breath and allow it to re-connect to your broader body consciousness. And in my body, I noticed my achilles on my morning run today and stopped to do some sun salutations by the bank of a foggy lake. And now, I reflect on that moment with true pride. We can allow in our day-to-day opportunities for communion with ourselves and with others, across scales of time and size. Thanks to my new physics friend C-K for showing me some data that helped me make some better empirical sense for how this works.

On Time

Dr. David Pincus — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:17:46 +0000

First some questions: What is time? In a physical sense? In psychological terms? What does time do? How does it work? Can it be transcended? Time in many ways is like space. In physics, time and space are woven together, like a fabric upon which all matter lies. At the limits, near the speed of light, movement in time is yoked to movement in space. As spatial speed increases, temporal speed slows. Recent quantum physics, in the area of non-local phenomena, suggests that both time and space are not as they appear on our scale of existence. It appears that particles, separated in both space and time, interact, in a simultaneous manner. Indeed, in one of the strangest experimental effects, the future may causally impact the past (the implications of that one will make your head spin). Distant particles are somehow connected, are somehow not distant. It is as if the space and time between did not really exist, nor the proposed distinction. Rather, these physicists (cf. Yakir Aharonov, Jeff Tollakson, and Menas Kafatos) suggest that perhaps there is an underlying singularity or unity to matter, across both time and space. Many spiritual traditions, philosophies, songs, and so on have suggested similar ideas - "We are one, heartache to heartache....love is a battlefield" - Pat Benatar.

Beyond funny ‘80's rocker references, such notions are at the heart of spiritual practices, across the various world traditions, even mainstream Christianity which proposes that God exists outside the bounds of time. This is why my Christian friends have already been forgiven for sins not yet committed. I like this belief of a god outside of time. Indeed, the practice of stepping outside the bounds of space and time, of opening consciousness to grasp the infinite, of allowing the infinite and the singular to fold into an infinitely increasing and decreasing wave, beyond the notion of quantity itself - embracing the unity of the infinite.... I think this is where meditation may lead (I don't meditate myself, so I can't tell you with any certainty).

So what is time? On a psychological level, time is quite malleable as well. When life speeds up, time slows down, such as at moments of great threat - traumas that require a slower arena for the will to act. If you are about to be hit by a car, time should slow down for you, allowing you perhaps to jump or duck (if there is time of course). Anyone with panic disorder will tell you that their 10-15 minute long panic attacks actually feel eternal. Of course things are not that simple. Time goes slowly when one lacks meaning as well. Think back to the old clock on the wall of your last class of the week back in high-school.

Like most of the things we discuss in this blog - time is experienced in a fractal manner, as is space. Searches across (memory-based) time and space tends to be carried out in fractal (branch-like) patterns. For example: If I asked you to search memory for happy times in your life, you could answer based on a year-by-year basis (ah yes! To be 18 again...), a month-by-month basis (October was a great month for me this past year), week-by-week (last week was a good one here), day-by-day, hour-by-hour, and so on (this minute is not as good as one I had 10 minutes ago). Psychotherapists count on this in their work everyday, as therapy unfolds within relational time - exchange-by-exchange, on the quarter-hour, session-by-session, and across the phases of treatment.

I don't know what time is, beyond a mysterious self-similar backdrop upon which we lead our lives. It is intricately woven across the scales of observation - from the quantum level to the phenomenological time of cultural revolutions. I do also know, on a deeply practical level, that each moment in time carries the potential for great integrity within our lives. If we can become aware of moments as they flow by, focusing our intention on just that awareness, we can connect to a thread beyond time: A thread of meaning that attaches moments together, moments separated in a branchlike way through fractal time. This thread may be strengthened, like a rope that holds an anchor of security within a complex world. I am me, right now, and also the sad 5 year-old boy who had to put his frog back in the pond on a family camping trip, and the teen-ager at a good concert, and the young man doing my first official session of therapy on my own, and I am me on my wedding day, with the ring on my middle-aged finger the same as the one being placed upon my hand. Across fractal time, we are more truly ourselves. Perhaps this is what we experience on our way to death? The weaving of our personal quilts of moments in time, big and small, all bound together. Perhaps time slows into death, approaching an asymptote, unyoking itself from our current experience of time and reaching down into the timelessness of quanta, some quantum afterlife? Perhaps it is this singularity that the physicists grasp when they look at the edges of scale - of huge and tiny. Perhaps they are glimpsing in their experiments what the wise shamans have known all along through a different means? A oneness at the bounds of existence, beyond the veil of the infinite pile of ticks and tocks that we use to structure our existence.

Life 101: Control and Chaos in Everyday Life

Dr. David Pincus — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:25:45 +0000

I started attending Camp Minikani in Huburtus Wisconsin when I was in 7th grade. I ended up working there as a camp counselor until I was 22 years old. I learned a lot at camp, foundational lessons that formed who I am - particularly my professional identity as a psychologist. Some of the best lessons were learned in leading our older campers in canoeing trips down the "Mighty Peshtigo" (in truth - the rapids of the Peshtigo were very tiny, but great counselors live on hyperbole). The lessons learned in river boating apply throughout life. One of life's greatest lessons lies in the way in which we cope with periods of relative calm and turbulence, with simplicity and with chaos.

On a river, as in life, there are joys and perils. The greatest joys are built through connection with oneself and ones boating companions, all within the broader context of the journey downstream. These invisible threads will sew the value of one's adventure, a tapestry of patterns - memories of merry-made and rapids run.

In calm water, one may feel the power of ones paddle, propelling a boat from bank to bank, under low shady trees and over shallow rocks where tadpoles nest. When life is calm, one feels in control. This type of control is known as "primary control." This type of control is embraced most strongly by Western values. These are the same values that drove Watson, Skinner and the other American Behaviorists to develop technologies of behavior modification that have lessoned so many areas of human suffering, from bed wetting to panic attacks. Primary control is the mentality of the American Frontier, where people grab their bulls by their horns. Of course this is the best way to enjoy the doldrums of a calm river, in between rapids. Put your paddle in the water, engage your will and attention, and go where you want so long as you keep heading downstream.

In the turbulence of rapids, life demands a different strategy. What would happen if you actually grabbed a bull by its horns? Not such a good idea after all. Here one is better served by "secondary control" strategies. Secondary control is embraced by indigenous and Eastern cultures. This is the control of the Tao, where a river becomes stronger than rock, as the former flows around the latter. When approaching whitewater, one opens ones awareness, gazing downstream, and building a holistic map of the various possible paths ahead. An open and flexible gaze is key. If one's gaze is too fixed, opportunities may be missed. If one plunges ahead too quickly, then one may run smack into a "stopper." A stopper is a rigid washing machine-like dynamic that can capsize you and hold you against the bottom of the river for hours or even days (or so told the British training videos we showed our campers before we took on the mighty Peshtigo!).

Just as important as an open and flexible gaze is an open and flexible connection to the river. When entering rapids, one should maintain contact between ones paddle and the river. If you pull your paddle out of the water, you may lose your balance and tip. If you dig too deeply into the water, your paddle may hit a rock and launch you into the rapids. Rather - one stays balanced and poised for action, aware and connected with the rushing water, neither dominant over it, nor fused with it. One's evaluations also stay flexible. If you miss a path, you flow with it, into the next path. It is rarely an efficient strategy to fight against the current. In turbulence - the best strategy is to maintain light contact and awareness, to seek "oneness" with the river and its complex flows.

This great paradox is one of the most difficult for humans to grasp and live by, to put our usual instincts alive and to willfully release from ourselves our agendas in times of great chaos. Nowhere is this truer than when one is in the grip of the dreaded "stopper," which holds us down in our most dire of circumstances. The only way out of a stopper is to give ones self over to it. Struggle depletes oxygen and pulls one down. If one relaxes, a stopper is more likely to spit you back out into the water. When it does, it also pays to remember to keep one's head upstream - feet make better springboards than heads do.

Secondary control has been reformulated by the New American Behaviorists as "acceptance-based" and "mindfulness" strategies in psychotherapy, all the trend lately. Yet anyone who has ever been down a river, or enjoyed any of the other countless adventures of life, will already know on a deep and implicit level how life may best be lived.

The Charlie Brown Christmas Blog

Dr. David Pincus — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:31:38 +0000

Hi chaospsychology readers. First I apologize for taking so long between blogs. I'll spare you the details. And some qualifiers and caveats up front before this entry, which will consist of some reflections by a Jew on the depth and personal significance of Christmas. If I offend, it is unintended - and if I must defend myself, I will claim ignorance. So if anyone is inclined to be offended, it would just be a waste of your time.

This blog is about chaos theory and psychology, and the topic will be Charlie Brown and Christmas. Chaos theory, Charlie Brown, and Christmas all fit nicely together actually - and it will not take a chaotic mind to see how. Let me start with some nice research results. Just what you wanted for Christmas right? But for me, a non-linear researcher trying out a brand new methodology for measuring self-complexity, research results were the perfect gift. My lab assistants at Chapman University worked diligently all semester long and finally got a data set I've had on hold for three years ready to run some analyses: lots of tedious work. What we got was some very nice initial results which suggest that complexity theory applies to the structure of the self concept. This means essentially that the self-concept is organized as branch-like fractal pattern. Furthermore, the self-system appears to be shaped and to grow and change just like plants, arteries, bronchial tubes, heart rate patterns, neurons and many more natural systems. A healthy self-concept is a more complex self-concept. Complexity = flexibility = balance = health. Nice results indeed. For the geekier minded out there - we've got several thousand MMPI-2 personality profiles with reaction times (number of seconds) to each of 587 items and found significant fits to power law distributions. This would make sense if answering the items on the questionnaire involved introspecting on a fractal structure (i.e., infinitely complex branching structure). Next, we found that the fractal dimension (i.e., complexity) of those distributions was significantly correlated with MMPI-2 personality scores including: two anxiety scales, two depression scales, ego strength, schizophrenia, 2 addiction scales and marital discord. This means that the degree of complex branching in who you are predicts healthy psychosocial functioning in a very broad way - across diagnostic categories.

Along with past published research we've done (see prior blogs), these results suggest: a) that the self behaves like a fractal; b) that multiple selves coalesce to create social dynamics that also are fractals; c) that unresolved conflict or fear-based dynamics create constrictions in self and interpersonal processes that lead to a destructive loss of balance and flexibility; and d) that resolving these imbalances through "love-based" dynamics (e.g., self-acceptance and social understanding, mindfulness and empathy) leads to spreading growth and healing - downward into our biological systems and perhaps below, and upward through our social networks.

This is what happened symbolically to the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree in the classic special from many of our youths'. If you don't recall, Charlie Brown was in charge of buying the tree for the group's Christmas pageant. But he screwed up, buying a spindly rigid looking tree (low fractal dimension in non-linear jargon). His dysfunctional cohort judged and shamed him for this. Indeed, the tree was a good symbol for Charlie Brown, children with untreated dysthymic disorder like Charlie Brown (chronic low grade depression) would be expected to suffer as he does, particularly socially and during the holidays. And where are his parents anyway? But he's not the only one of the gang who is struggling through the holidays. It is clear that Lucy has borderline personality disorder; she is very internally conflicted and creates conflict all around her. Ironically, she is the psychologist for the rest of the group. Draw your own conclusions there. Linus likely has generalized anxiety disorder, and Snoopy is a classic narcissist (that's why he is so attractive right?). The healthiest of all the characters is Peppermint Patty, along with her partner Marcy, likely because they are lesbians and have had to go through some growth during the coming out process. Nevertheless, they would likely be in better shape psychologically if they could be assisted through the process of coming out completely to the rest of the peanuts crew: Maybe in Christmas 2009? But I digress...

What I would suggest to you this holiday season, and better yet throughout 2009 is that you behave like the peanuts, and symbolically like that little tree, which only needed a little love to become full and merry. When you are with yourself, notice your dysfunction - your fears that scare you, your fears that front as anger, and your fears that cover your pain. Notice the fears of others too. Once you see your fears and the fears of others, aim to accept them and to come up with new ways of loving yourself and others - in your habits, in your outlooks, and in your heart. When your most annoying relative does that thing you hate, see the vulnerability that drives that behavior, and love that vulnerability. When you feel yourself getting sucked into an old role that you dislike, embrace the newness of your current self. And when your caregivers, now aging or gone, don't satisfy your deepest unmet needs this year, see their humanity and forgive their flaws. Seriously - this is all cliché, but if you really do it, even here or there, you and the broader world will be healed - just a bit - from your molecules to your neighborhoods and beyond.

As a Jew, I am able to stand back from Christmas and appreciate it without any baggage of my own family traditions. I spent Christmases bored and alone as a child, with the pride that I was being a good Jew, suffering the minor loss of Santa which put me in solidarity with my ancestors struggled even to exist. I spent wonderful, loud, delicious Christmas's with my Sicilian friends the Manones in High School. And now I spend what I think is a traditional Norwegian farm style Christmas with my wife's family in Wisconsin, going to Lutheran Church, singing songs, eating Christmas foods, and playing games in front of the fire. Perfect? Yes, in many ways, yes. I love the way that my in-laws still care for their grown children, who regress for two days - wearing pajamas and drinking root beers, and playing dominoes. But no one is perfect, even in this idyllic setting. Certainly not I, the Jewish son-in-law who likes to sing out load and proud in monotone at church, who is picky about food and likes to do his own thing? Perfect? I think not. And perhaps I am not the only imperfect one.

If Jesus was a Christmas tree, he clearly would not be the biggest or most expensive; the greenest, or the longest lasting. Jesus would be the fullest tree, symmetrical, yet rich with full thick beautiful branches. If those branches were habits - they would allow him the flexibility to love his enemies yet rebel angrily against those who ruled the temples and the empire without integrity. He was not reckless, but he was complex. He was pure, but not simple. He loved prostitutes and lepers, yet rallied against the powers that be, and always strived to move the god of the Old Testament, the god within each of us, to a place of love.

Do I believe then? No, still a Jew. But he was clearly a messiah, even if only because of his far reaching impact. Most Christians don't practice correctly (nor most Jews - present company included). But that's okay. You see Jesus's complexity allowed him to dial in to something very deep and large, and to spread that complexity across time and interpersonal space. Once everyone is done practicing, perhaps "he" will indeed "return." Probably the most difficult bit of New Testament for a Jew is the part about the way to god only being through Jesus. But as a Jew, we love to pour over scripture - to wrestle with it. I believe that Jesus was correct, but not that heaven, or other "presents" would come only to those who believe blindly that he was the literal son. No. Rather, he was correct that the way to create heaven on earth is to be like him - to grow, to branch out, and to open our hearts, minds, and habits to love. You don't need to be as rich or full a tree as him, and it might not be a good idea to try for such a lofty goal. There are already hundreds of modern day Jesuses in the psychiatric wards of our big cities. But you can look for love here and there, especially in the coming thaw of spring. If someone won't allow you to love them, then seek to understand them instead. This is the better part of love anyway. Within self and other understanding, new growth and healing - this is where psychology, chaos theory, Christmas, and the Charlie Brown Christmas tree can come together [thanks again to Clint Sprot for the 'fractal of the day']

Peace...

Dr. Dave

Chaos Catastrophe and our Economy: A Collapse of Confidence

Dr. David Pincus — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:23:21 +0000

It appears that the free market is a confidence game, and that when confidence falters, chaos can run wild. So here is the view of one confident chaopsychologist...

Carlin Flora, Senior Editor at Psychology Today, sent out the following message last week to spark some content from bloggers on the psychology of the economic bailout. She wrote:
Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.), chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, opened the questioning at today's hearing asking Mr. Bernanke why a smaller authorization - perhaps $150 billion - wouldn't be enough to start. Installments would ensure that taxpayers' interests are protected and allow officials to evaluate the success of whatever program is used to buy mortgage assets. "This is just an idea, one of many that we in Congress are considering as we try to responsibly respond to this dire situation," Mr. Schumer explained.
"Probably $1 trillion would be better than $700 billion," he said. "Do you think that $150 billion is insufficient to assure the markets that Congress is serious and the government is serious about addressing this problem?"
Mr. Bernanke noted that he isn't part of the legislative or executive branches, and therefore has "no standing to negotiate this proposal." (Mr. Paulson wasn't at the committee hearing but is scheduled to testify Wednesday afternoon before the House.) But Mr. Schumer wanted the perspective from Mr. Bernanke, the economist.
"Senator, you asked me my opinion as an economist," Mr. Bernanke replied. "Unfortunately, this is a matter for psychology."
The key issue, Mr. Bernanke explained, is that "markets need to have confidence" the problem will be addressed. The government is essentially sending a signal to financial markets. An insufficient amount could be seen as "dribs and drabs" to solve the issue, he said. "It is a very big problem and we don't want to undershoot it." [endquote]

I am not an expert on economics, far from it. But I do know a bit about how complex adaptive systems work [see my blogs on "Batman Parts I to III"], and the economic markets are indeed complex adaptive systems [see Barkley Rosser's home page for research applying chaos and related theories to economics http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb/]. And confidence is one of the most useful and best understood concepts in psychology.

I'll start with the issue of confidence, because that's where I am most confident (get it? ha ha ha, I'm also apparently very funny). Okay, back to work: Albert Bandura has led research into confidence (technical term is "self-efficacy;" for about 30 years now. The central work in this area was based on building confidence in snake phobics, exposing these individuals to Boa Constrictors and assessing which factors most successfully predict their ability to eventually face or handle these snakes. Bandura's primary result was that confidence beliefs predicted success more strongly than any other factor studied, even past success. So belief is crucial, at the level of the individual, and apparently at the larger scale of this complex network - the collective confidence of people in the markets. In other words, the confidence of individuals is critical, as collectively this confidence emerges at the much larger scale of collective behavior within the economy. Confidence is contagious among individuals, as is chaos and panic. The recent fatal run on withdrawals from Washington Mutual is a clear example. The confidence of the part, the individual, is critical for understanding the confidence of the whole, the collective behavior of the markets and the banks. The reverse is true as well. My inclination to pull out of my 401K, to buy gold and bury it in the back yard will combine with that inclination of others as the market drops in day-to-day 10% chunks, and the value of gold puffs up. And these figures serve to feed the catastrophic collapse and ensuing chaos.

So confidence is key. But what will build confidence? Unfortunately, the best confidence builder is prior success. Our minds are practical in that sense. You can't just pump something up when true talent is lacking, there will be an eventual crash. This is the confidence game that was going on with Wall Street, where things were going up in the short-term, building false confidence. But the gains were built upon nothing, no substance. The market was running around in a manic episode, like someone who jumps out a window and thinks he can fly because he feels the wind in his face. Too much confidence can be dangerous.

So unfortunately, the economy and the government have not been too successful lately. You have probably noticed this! Essentially, organisms learn confidence by observing themselves doing well. Through observational learning you see yourself doing well, which builds confidence: Simple as that. If we see things going well in the economy, we will act collectively in a confident manner, and the feedback from the markets, at the larger scale, will inform us that things are getting better.

But the reverse is true as well. And gains made across the backdrop of market volatility will tend to have little power to build true confidence. And reassurance that our leaders will act swiftly to fix things will do little either, even from our great and highly esteemed president (see - I told you I was funny).

You can't just build self-esteem or confidence through will power or cajoling or a massive bailout alone. Things need to genuinely go well, little by little, and we need to notice it. That's it.

Now even though our government and markets have not done "good" lately, it may help a bit that we have survived several recessions and one great depression in the past. These prior survivals may calm the nerves a bit. Former US President, Bill Clinton, on Sunday's meet the press responded with this type of confidence, suggesting that if we can make it out of this crisis we will be on a good path, having relearned some essential lessons concerning the need for regulation: "[when we are through this] you're not gonna have these crazy binges of sub-sub-prime mortgages or derivatives because people now recognize all over again what they had to learn in the depression and two or three times since, that markets that are left unaccountable, at the margins, will self destruct, they will cannibalize themselves, so I think we've learned that." Ironically, Clinton helped to ring the dinner bell when he finished Reagan's work in repealing the last of the post-depression financial regulations.

Nevertheless, by likening the global economic system to an individual human system, Clinton may be describing the type of resiliency that comes following recovery from self-destruction. Surviving a trauma can build very deep confidence indeed, as well as the coping skills that will support that confidence. Clinton was suggesting the optimistic view that we have been through similar problems before and that we will likely evolve some new coping skills: new regulatory policies and business practices.

On the negative, a number of other factors could interfere with this type of growth and confidence as well. For example if you observe yourself doing "good," but you are doing so under special circumstances, if the good is not attributable to "you" you can be left less confident, even if the outcome is success. A good example comes from research into childhood attachment. Within "attachment theory" the goal of parenting is essentially to be attuned to a child's needs for comfort and security on the one hand, and the ability to build competence and self-confidence on the other. If you over-support a child, you erode confidence.

I asked a very well-informed cabbie the other day for his opinion, and he likened it to healing from a back injury - ‘If you leave a brace on too long, your back ends up getting weak, and things get worse.'

Support back to health should be just enough to allow the system to re-organize, evolve, and heal, and nothing more. No you don't want to "undershoot it" as Mr. Bernanke has cautioned, but you don't want to overshoot it either. There are perils on both sides, under support could allow the system to fall apart into chaos, and over-support will maintain the rigidity and fragility of the system.

When asked, for example, what I "do" with clients in therapy (the age old what is your theoretical approach question), my wise guy answer is: "As little as possible." An alternative answer could be, "Just as much as is necessary and not a bit more."

You want to activate the internal healing resources of the system without contaminating them. This recovery has to be about the banks and the markets, not the government. This is a tough sell in an election cycle of course. Nevertheless, the parts of the system must attribute it's recovery to itself in order for robust healing to occur.

So you want just the right amount of bailout targeted only where it is needed. The question of "How much?" and "Where?" I will leave to others who know more than I. It seems that the plan that our congress failed to agree upon over the past couple of days does try to strike this balance, with the money being dolled out in three parts, over time, with oversight and market responsibility. It would have been a little "clunkier" than I would have liked, but it's congress after all.

Bush is not the only bad father figure in our government. Like a mother and father embroiled in constant conflict over a needy child, our congress is about as dysfunctional as you can get at instilling confidence from their constituents. We are often left with that yucky feeling of the mom blaming the dad while they continually ask us who we want to live with once the divorce is final. But once they get the deal passed, and they move on to blaming each other for the mess for the next several months ("You know it was your mother who wanted that bailout, I was really against it the whole time!"), the next step will be reforming the regulations.

I'll chime in there too, even though it's way outside my scope of expertise, using very general terms informed by a complex adaptive systems perspective [see http://www.societyforchaostheory.org]. The free market ideology is flawed because it is based on the assumption of a mechanistic or closed system. Many models of the economy I understand are still based on the antiquated idea of homeostasis as well, that there is some set point that the market tries to correct itself toward. The model describes the markets like a thermostat making corrections when things get too hot or too cold.

In actuality, free markets are wildly complex and interdependent systems, operating at times far-from-equilibrium, and displaying order not through homeostasis, but through processes such as emergence, and self-organization (where parts emerge into wholes which go on to regulate parts). Market systems evolve over time and may tune their complexity-order balance to manage internal and external demands. And if they become too wild, they can tip into high degree chaos, becoming disintegrated. If they become too rigid, as was the case in the current crisis, they can suffer a catastrophe. They can collapse under the weight of their own debt: "cannibalizing themselves," as profit and borrowing do an increasingly quick ball-room dance with one another. Eventually, the dance falls apart at the seams. Whether it is through the route of chaos or catastrophe, the results are potentially devastating when the scale of the dance is so large.

If you had a very small and simple system, a closed in theory, say a small market square with a fixed number of vendors, where no one came in or out, and everyone relied on everyone else for a variety of good and services, then let the free market evolve without restriction. But of course this is a false construction, a fantasy. Even if such a market existed, you would need regulation to keep the gun shop owner from turning rogue and taking over the flower shop. Even in tribal economies one would occasionally encounter wars, over-specialization, and slave-trades.

The modern world is comprised of highly open, interconnected systems, and the scale is now global - it has grown up to that level. These systems are interconnected across various types of systems and across scales of size, as the politicians say: from Wall Street to Main Street.

The scales these days are truly global. If such systems are left to run themselves, the incentives will always turn toward short-term profit and consolidation of power. I heard His Holliness the Dalai Lama respond to a question about the morality of big business. He responded essentially that in capitalist systems the distribution of wealth may not be so good, but the products are very good (I think he pointed to his Nike Sneakers at that point). In communist systems, the equity of wealth may be good, but the products are not so good. His solution was to market the idea of long-term profit. His only quibble with the free market was its focus on short-term gains. This, in his opinion, is where all the "evil" comes from.

Who am I to disagree with His Holiness. The more power consolidates, at the largest scales, the more this power can be leveraged to create artificially huge short term gains. Big scales of size lead can lead to short scales of time. Again, as Bill Clinton describes: "...crazy binges of sub-sub-prime mortgages or derivatives because people now recognize all over again what they had to learn in the depression and two or three times since, that markets that are left unaccountable, at the margins, will self destruct, they will cannibalize themselves." When the largest banks spread over the borders to become both traditional and also investment banks, the scales are tipped toward "bigness." At the same time, when a lack of regulation allows these banks to run on empty, with 30 dollars being leveraged for every 1 dollar held, and when these 30 dollars are borrowed from other empty banks, you have a system cannibalizing itself. And the waste-product produced after this destructive Wall Street banquet is plopped right down on "main street." I'm looking off my back porch at 3 bank owned condos in a row right now. Seriously. This is the big stinking crap of Wall Street, no?

Every system that shifts rigid needs to export its waste, its entropy, to some neighboring system. For a good read on this Nobel Prize winning concept, Nicolis Prigogine's work on chemical systems is a good read. A system can violate the second law of thermodynamics (order tends toward disorder) locally, with order emerging from relative chaos, so long as that system discharges a greater amount of entropy to neighboring systems.

Do all of us as the taxpayers need a giant pooper scooper? "Yes." This is what the bailout plan is, a giant pooper scooper. And maybe the detritus of the bad mortgage debts can be used to fertilize some gardens here and there. Who knows? We can hope. But we should only scoop up as much as the system needs to survive. This hangover needs to hurt for reform to come. And the reforms, whatever they are, should focus on confidence. Hope is not the same as confidence. Otherwise, Obama would be farther ahead in the polls, no?

What makes the market truly robust?

1) Diversity. Power-consolidation needs to be limited to keep the balance that true competition adds to the free market. We used to know that monopolies were bad. What happened there? Keeping some financial industries small enough keeps the scale of power from growing too large. The experts will need to define the terms and boundaries here. The main issue is not to let any single fish get too big for a single pond. Big is fine. But too big for the pond and you risk collapse when that fish starts eating its own tail. Systems with many agents are capable of re-emergence and growth. Those that are too top heavy risk collapse. Again the experts will have to determine the boundaries of each ponds (i.e., traditional versus investment bank, insurance company versus hedge fund, mortage debt versus derivative), and how big is big.

2) Long-term gain. Any regulations that facilitate long-term growth over short term risk are good. What is long and what is short, again I will leave to someone who knows what they are talking about, not me.

3) Waste. What are the costs of growth? Waste, in the form of bad entropy should be disincentiveized. This may be accomplished through firm regulations in the most egregious cases, or through taxation in fuzzier circumstances (i.e., carbon tax). It is not worth growing financially on the short-term if we are stuck living in the midst of toxic waste products for the long-haul. And we need to consider waste more broadly, with carryover across vast systems. Waste may be financial (bad loans and foreclosures), environmental (empty houses), human (failing neighborhoods and homeless children), ethical (greed and huge financial disparities), or in the case of the current crisis: All of the above. Let me know what you think.

-Dr. Dave

* Thanks also to Clint Sprott for the "fractal of the day" image above

New Physics + New Psychology = New Questions

Dr. David Pincus — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:21:52 +0000

New physics + new psychology = new questions

Thanks again to Clint Sprott for the fractal to the left. I'll apologize again for being more than two weeks to post the follow-up to "bad apples." I had a lot going on with a book on pain management due to Routledge Press and the new semester at Chapman starting last Monday. It may turn out to be the case that during the busy times of the semester, I will only be able to post every two weeks, rather than every week as I had hoped. I'm going to post this whole thing too, even though it is pretty long.

Despite the distractions I legitimately had, I have also been procrastinating on writing this one up. I had originally intended to write a follow up to "Bad Apples," which would have been easy, addressing questions of how to manage internal and interpersonal conflicts. Instead, I am going to share an anecdote in the life of a new career academic psychologist (me) that I hope will be interesting and some day lead to some more formalized work on my part. In other words, this post will not include polished, useful information for any readers. Sorry about that. In fact, it will be unpolished and incomplete - living up to the spirit of a web "log" I hope.

The story begins at Chapman University, where I am an assistant professor, at the start of this new semester. Chapman has made some big hires lately in order to step up in quality from the top 10 of smaller western region universities into the elite schools at the national level. The latest of their grand acquisitions was picking up an entire physics department and more from George Mason University. The move is not unlike a basketball team purchasing marquee players through free agency. Because chaos and related theories are used across each of the sciences, and because I am a big fan of popular physics books, I assigned myself the summer reading of a book by one of these new professors, most likely our new Dean of the newly forged College of Science at Chapman (parenthetically we had a cantankerous 30+ minute discussion on whether "science" should have an "s" on it or not at our first faculty meeting of the year - 20% frustrating, 30% sad, and 50% hilarious IMO).

The book is called: "The non-local universe: The new physics and matters of the mind" by Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos (Kafatos is the new professor). The book is small, but is a tough read - very dense and very smartly written. It combines philosophy of science with the latest experimental physics results on the wave-particle duality of matter and as the title suggests, non-local interactions found in physics experiments. Here is where I may butcher the physics, and wander into "new age" thinking. So since this is a public forum - (a) scientists please forgive me for technical errors; and (b) New-ager's please do not try to recruit me. I am an open minded scientific psychologist who read an interesting book, nothing more or less than that.

These caveats in mind, "Non-locality" refers to a number of well replicated studies in mainstream physics that have demonstrated that particles that were once united continue to remain united, even when separated by great distances - many miles apart. Imagine splitting a particle and sending the two halves off miles and miles apart. In principle, these studies demonstrate that these connections would occur even if the distances were infinite. If you do some act of measurement on one part of the particle, the other part will show an effect from this measurement. And the effect will occur instantaneously. There can be no signaling, no information sent from one particle to the other, not without going faster than the speed of light, at infinite speed in fact. It is like the distance between the two parts is not really there.

In many dense pages, they connect these results to other similar lines of evidence from mathematics and physics. Most of the examples came from nonlinear dynamics theories (chaos, complexity, self-organization, and so on covered in my prior blogs). You see, the new systems theories carry heavy philosophical implications, and they knock classical science (reductionism, Newton's clocklike universe, and so on) on its butt. This is why I keep saying with so much certainty that the psychology of the bell curve (independent events) and linear relationships (strait line one directional cause and effect) is so uninteresting and insignificant.

Anyway, they got into the "wave-particle dualities" from Schrodinger and Heisenberg, in which the act of observing a wave turns it into a particle, and in which it is impossible to ever know the position AND the momentum of a particle at the same time. They also got into a bit of "fuzzy set theory," in which one may prove mathematically that A may be equal to B and also not equal to B at the same time, violating the foundation of classical mathematics dating back to Aristotle. Overall, their focus was on the longstanding debate between Einstein and Bohr. Einstein famously argued that ‘God does not play dice' with the universe, while Bohr argued that accumulating experimental results in quantum physics were correct, indicating that there are hard and fast limitations to the ability to ever understand the entire universe objectively.

I remained slightly on Einstein's side while reading the book, to be honest, even though he was wrong it seems. And I became interested in what I thought was a possible solution to wave-particle duality. Essentially, very small bits of matter (particles, strings, whatever) are best described mathematically as waves. But when they are observed, they appear as a particle. My proposed solution was that time depends not only on velocity (i.e., Einstein's "theory of relativity"), but also on size, or scale. So very fast moving matter relatively would slow time down, and very big things relatively would have slower time. The solution here would be that on the quantum level of the very small, matter would exist as a wave, a particle moving very quickly across some attractor space. But at our big human elephant size scale, quantum time would appear to freeze when we try to observe this wave, leaving us only ever to detect experimentally a frozen, static particle. The metaphor is a movie, which looks like it is moving only when moving quickly. If you grab a film reel and it stops, you see that it is just a single frame. Waves are animated particles.

So when I saw that our new physics department chair, Jeff Tollaksen, was talking about this stuff in a lunch presentation last week at our start of the year faculty conference I was excited to grab him afterward and ask if I had solved the Einstein Bohr debate or not, and figuring I had not (I'm not quite that cocky actually), why not? I got even more excited when Jeff started presenting on non-locality occurring not just over great spans of space, but also across different periods of TIME. He was suggesting that you could change the outcome of some physical measurement at the quantum scale at a time in the past, based upon how you did some measurement at a later point in time. Paraphrasing him: ‘It appears that on the quantum scale, not only does the present affect the future, but the future has an effect on the past.'

Please keep in mind at this point that these are hard-core mainstream physicists. This is not at all from the fringe. And their results are based on repeated experiments, even technology already in use that uses such time warps. All of this seemed to fit well with my thinking: that size "scales" with time. Essentially, our act of observation at this very slow scale we live in has already happened long ago at the speedy quantum level. If anyone ever watched the Speedy Gonzalez cartoons as a kid, it's like when speedy gets El Gato (the cat) to hit himself in the face by repositioning things while the slower El Gato is preparing to pounce. Andale!

So I grabbed Jeff by the stack of pizza's we had for lunch (good choice Chapman - yum!) and asked him if I had solved wave particle duality or not. He paused a pretty long time, and tried to find the words to answer telling me it was an interesting question. I don't think he was just stymied by my lack of knowledge, or that he was just trying to be nice. That said, I don't think I have solved the issue. His basic answer, what I could follow, was "yes," this was possible, but that the ultimate truths would be much more far-out than just that.

He said we needed to keep learning about the bounds of time. He then described in greater detail some of the funky time results they were observing in their lab. For example, they have found ways to embed particles in two or more discrete point in time. I think this means the particle does not exist continuously, but sort of magically appears only when you observe it at two or more exact points in time. He said the freakiest version of this is the ‘eternity particle' (either that or the ‘destiny particle' I can't find much on either in google, and I can't remember which he called it). This is a particle that exists only if you include observation at all time points stretching out to infinity. Nice right? But not as goofy as it sounds. Not only is the math fitting and the experiments supporting these time warp ideas. The government, according to Jeff, is paying big bucks to use these phenomena for national security purposes. For example, encoding a message in a combination of up to an infinite number of time points is a great way to hide an important secret.

Besides the implications such as these, and others like time travel, parallel universes, and so on, this brief encounter stimulated many more questions for me, which stretch the bounds of current psychology. I am also immediately hopeful that psychology, in cooperation with the other sciences (sorry Chapman Science faculty - I used the "s" there). Here is a rather lengthy quote from Nadeau and Kafatos (1999) that captures my enthusiasm for the future of the new systems psychology (i.e., chaos, complexity, and self-organization) that lies within this topic:

"If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. 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.
But since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite literally, beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe is a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose....On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, can be dismissed, undermined, or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
....It now seems clear that this radical separation between mind and world was a macro-level illusion fostered by limited awareness of the actual character of physical reality and by mathematical idealizations that were extended beyond the realm of their applicability."

In a nutshell, they are describing the framework that those of us in chaos and complexity psychology have also been using. Each branch of science (no "s") emerges from the branch at the smaller scales below. Chemistry emerges from physics, biology emerges from chemistry, psychology emerges from biology, sociology emerges from psychology, and so on, with various emergent branches within and across each of the different disciplines. At SCTPLS, we have the tradition of passing nested Russian dolls on to each new society president as a symbol of this outlook. Parts interact to create new irreducible wholes, which serve as parts for new irreducible wholes and so on. Apparently, this occurs not only across scales from small to large - parts of an inseparable whole, but also across great distances of apparent space - where the here is connected to there; and finally across time, where one finds that future and past are also inseparable.
Perhaps toward the middle or end of my career, and on after that, the lines will continue to be blurred in science. Then psychological science may examine bigger questions than most of our usual self-help topics. We can begin to consider quantum consciousness, conscious processes at the various scales, larger and smaller, than our brains. We could examine whether and how influences at one scale influence other scales (i.e., can the quantum change consciousness and vice versa).

We can examine here-to-fore religious concepts like reincarnation, pre-lives, and afterlives. I'm not saying whether such things exist or not, only that they would be fun to study. I've mused for a long time that if perception of time slowed down increasingly as a function of proximity to biological brain death, then one would never perceive his or her own demise: A biologically-based afterlife. Once we understand the neural substrates of time perception, these systems could be observed in dying individuals, looking for just such a lawful mathematical relation.

Or perhaps the sync that occurs near brain death goes much smaller, past the biology of the brain, all the way down the quantum scale, where some important subset of our physical particles disappear into eternity, existing only at infinite points in time? Perhaps we are not just reincarnated into the future, but could be "re-born" as some living creature living thousands of years in the past. Maybe I'm my own great-great-great grandmother? Who knows? I'd like to find out if it's possible or not.

And what about the stretching the bounds of human consciousness? The little bit we know over the past 100 years of research into the imagination only serves to support what shaman's have known for more than 20,000 years: (a) the imagination is infinite, (b) the imagination is transpersonal and creative, and (c) the imagination has the potential to influence physical healing? How the heck does this work? Yes, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is involved in a proximal and central way, but come on! Perhaps there is a bit more to it?
It is an exciting time I think for science, and within science, psychology (both singular). Who knows what the future, or futures, or pasts, will bring.

Please let us know what you think?

Sincerely,

-Dr. Dave

One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch

Dr. David Pincus — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:01:26 +0000

Back from vacation. And thanks to everyone who has been reading about Chaos and Complexity theory and psychology here. The response has been larger and more positive that I ever would have expected from a topic that is a bit frightening even to most other researchers. And as always thanks to SCTPLS and Clint Sprott for the fractal of the day pictured to the left.

So I think we've all earned a shorter and more digestible blog entry this week, now that you have most of the basics covered. Let's turn to the universal experience of "BAD APPLES" - as in "One bad apple spoils the bunch." Bad apples are those acquaintances, family members and co-workers whose mere presence can suck the life right out of you. They also kill the ‘good energy' of the larger group.

I became interested in bad apples and the unique and interesting conflict they generate just like you - I worked for a few, I became acquainted with a few, I experienced them in my family dynamics from time to time, and though it is buried deep in my subconscious mind - I may have even taken on the role of the bad apple from time to time myself. On second thought, no I haven't...

Anyway, when I got into doing relationship research from using dynamic systems methods, it became apparent that "bad apples" represent one of the key ways that individual flows of information (self-conflicts and the like) can impact group flows of information (group conflicts and the like). They also provide a key for understanding how organizational consultants, group therapists, and family therapists work with individuals to improve group processes and also how one may work with group processes to assist with individual growth. Understanding bad apples also may help us to stay calm when we run into one of them and to realize that they REALLY ARE as destructive as they seem - unless of course the bad apple is you, in which case please leave this blog immediately! (Just kidding...please no stalking...No, I wasn't talking about you...sorry for apologizing so much...).

For the sake of brevity, I'll just describe one experimental study I did in this area. You can read it if you are interested in Small Group Research, April 2008. What we needed to do was to turn someone into a bad apple and see what impact this had on group dynamics. So we formed groups of strangers, four female psyc students to be exact. They were told to get to know one another during four, ½ hour conversations. We used the first 2 conversations to get what is called a "baseline:" the typical dynamics as they would unfold naturally given the girls' personalities and their fits with one another. Then during the break between conversations 2 and 3, we gave bogus feedback to one of the group members, telling her that the other members found her cold and abrasive. The actual feeback was longer than that - but that's the gist. We sent her back into discussion three with instructions not to share her feedback with any other group member. And we also made sure that she disagreed with the feedback, thus creating an internal conflict within her - "Am I really cold and abrasive? Or is it them?" While unlikely, we may have gotten someone who was really cold and abrasive and knew it. During conversation four, the "bad apple" was given permission to bring up the feedback with the other members, allowing for the possibility for some degree of conflict resolution.

What we found first is that all of the turn-taking in the conversation patterns fit a fractal pattern (see "Chaos Theory and Batman Part II). In other words, there were complex branching patterns in the repetitions of who talked to whom and in what order. Many patterns happened only once or twice in the discussion, like the small branches on the outskirts of a tree. Exponentially fewer conversation patterns repeated many times, like thick branches or the trunk of the tree near its center. We've replicated this result many times, in family, group therapy and in these experimental discussions and the result is always the same. This means that conversations are complex, evolving, self-organizing systems. They evolve in a similar manner to other living systems (in geology, biological evolution, chemical systems, botany, and more). There are too many implications there to cover here; so back to the bad apple part.

In conversation three, the bad apple sucked the branches right off the tree. The scenario always reminds me of the little Christman Tree from the Charlie Brown special. The little tree is somewhat symbolic of Charlie Brown, who in addition to being a clinically depressed child, was also a bad apple. Back to the research, the discussion shifted significantly in the rigid direction. Just like a sick plant, the foliage fell off of the group process. Of course, being good scientists we replicated the experiment - six times, each with a different group. We added to the design as well, inducing internal conflict into 0, 1, 2, 3, and in one group all four members. We also continued to examine what happened when groups discussed the false-feedback during discussion four, to see if the branches would grow back when the conflict was resolved.

Overall - they did. The level of induced and unresolved conflict across the 24 different discussions was significantly correlated with the complexity of the group's dynamics. It is also interesting to note that the bad apples did not report being particularly upset by the false feedback, there was no obvious conflict to either myself or any of the participants, and no major shifts were observed in their levels of participation. So the "bad apple effect" on group dynamics in the real world situations is probably far more powerful than what we observed here experimentally.

Conclusions - "Bad apples" are people who are internally conflicted. These internal conflicts tend to spread up to the level of the group, decreasing the groups' complexity, flexibility, and their ability to grow and adapt. On the more positive side, conflict resolution spreads as well, up from inside us and into our relationships, and down from our relationships to make us more internally flexible as well.

Implications - Expect conflict. Embrace it as a human condition. It is a means to our peril, as well as to our future resilience. And if you run into a bad apple, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!

So much for being brief; I'll keep working on it. As always - comments, suggestions and questions are greatly encouraged.

-Dr. Dave