Chaos - James Gleick [140]
CHAOTIC HARMONIES. The interplay of different rhythms. such as radio frequencies or planetary orbits, produces a special version of chaos. Below and on the facing page, computer pictures of some of the “attractors” that can result when three rhythms come together.
CHAOTIC FLOWS. A rod drawn through viscous fluid causes a simple, wavy form. If drawn several times, more complicated forms arise.
To Mandell, the discoveries of chaos dictate a shift in clinical approaches to treating psychiatric disorders. By any objective measure, the modern business of “psychopharmacology”—the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself—has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows. Mandell offered his colleagues a chilling assessment of the most commonly used drugs. Phenothiazines, prescribed for schizophrenics, make the fundamental disorder worse. Tricyclic anti-depressants “increase the rate of mood cycling, leading to long-term increases in numbers of relapsing psychopathologic episodes.” And so on. Only lithium has any real medical success, Mandell said, and only for some disorders.
As he saw it, the problem was conceptual. Traditional methods for treating this “most unstable, dynamic, infinite-dimensional machine” were linear and reductionist. “The underlying paradigm remains: one gene → one peptide → one enzyme → one neurotransmitter → one receptor → one animal behavior → one clinical syndrome → one drug → one clinical rating scale. It dominates almost all research and treatment in psychopharmacology. More than 50 transmitters, thousands of cell types, complex electromagnetic phenomenology, and continuous instability based autonomous activity at all levels, from proteins to the electroencephalogram—and still the brain is thought of as a chemical point-to–point switchboard.” To someone exposed to the world of nonlinear dynamics the response could only be: How naive. Mandell urged his colleagues to understand the flowing geometries that sustain complex systems like the mind.
Many other scientists began to apply the formalisms of chaos to research in artificial intelligence. The dynamics of systems wandering between basins of attraction, for example, appealed to those looking for a way to model symbols and memories. A physicist thinking of ideas as regions with fuzzy boundaries, separate yet overlapping, pulling like magnets and yet letting go, would naturally turn to the image of a phase space with “basins of attraction.” Such models seemed to have the right features: points of stability mixed with instability, and regions with changeable boundaries. Their fractal structure offered the kind of infinitely self-referential quality that seems so central to the mind’s ability to bloom with ideas, decisions, emotions, and all the other artifacts of consciousness. With or without chaos, serious cognitive scientists can no longer model the mind as a static structure. They recognize a hierarchy of scales, from neuron upward, providing an opportunity for the interplay of microscale and macroscale so characteristic of fluid turbulence and other complex dynamical processes.
Pattern born amid formlessness: that is biology’s basic beauty and its basic mystery. Life sucks order from a sea of disorder. Erwin Schrödinger, the quantum pioneer and one of several physicists who made a nonspecialist’s foray into biological speculation, put it this way forty years ago: A living organism has the “astonishing gift of concentrating a ‘stream of order’ on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos.” To Schrödinger, as a physicist, it was plain that the structure of living matter differed from the kind of matter his colleagues studied. The building block of life—it was not yet called