Heroes Not Zombies

Larry Dossey has written an article about harmony and chaos. As he rightly points out the concepts of harmony, order and “coherence” are so universally accepted as characteristics of a healthy system or organism that nobody really ever considers that this way of thinking might not completely capture the reality of health.
I suppose one area where I began to realise that health isn’t all about order and coherence was when I discovered that epileptic fits arise, not when the brain dissolves into the chaos of an “electrical storm” as was previously thought, but, rather when consistent waves of co-ordinated electrical activity wipe out the normal brain function. In other words, a seizure emerges out of rigidity, not chaos.
Healthy brain activity is probably more accurately represented as edge of chaos which can tip, on the one hand, into total chaos, or, on the other, into rigidity – neither of which is healthy.
It seems that studies on aging are beginning to highlight a similar issue. Both at the level of individual organs, like the heart, and at the level of the whole organism, it seems that as we age we lose a capacity to exist in some healthy zone of near chaos. In fact as we age we stiffen, we lose flexibility and, hence both resilience and adaptability.

“Chaos in bodily functioning signals health. Periodic [regular, rhythmic, coherent] behavior can foreshadow disease. Transitions to strongly periodic dynamics are observed in many pathologies, including Parkinson’s disease (tremor), obstructive sleep apnea, sudden cardiac death, epilepsy, and fetal distress syndromes, to name but a few.”

This makes a lot of sense when you consider the characteristics of complex systems. It’s true that you need a healthy level of “integration” ie of harmonious linkage between differentiated parts. However, for a system to be adaptable it must be flexible and for it to grow it needs to develop new patterns (a biological phenomenon known as “emergence”). Emergence only occurs when a system moves towards a “far from equilibrium” point, or some kind of tipping point. There are characteristics of complex systems known as “bifurcation points” where a system may go one way or another, and of “phase transitions”, where the whole behaviour of a system might suddenly change (for example, where liquid water turns to gaseous steam).
We are complex adaptive systems. We do need an incredibly intricate complex set of checks and balances, of feedback loops, of harmony and coherence. But we also need a bit of chaos, too much regularity can mean insufficient flexibility.