Author - Current Work - A Supple Heart Now that the US has gone to war, I suddenly notice a deafening silence from virtually all women. How do we speak when language and images of war inundate us? How do we speak when generals take to the podium and bombs fall on Taliban and non-Taliban alike? "Collateral damage" in the parlance of war happens when stray bombs hit innocent people. Throughout the last years of WWII in the Netherlands, my siblings and I slept in the cellar, supposedly the safest place in the house. However, how safe is it when whole families are wiped out? My two young cousins, their parents and maid were killed in their cellar. In our cellar we heard the screeching sound of V2 bombs about to drop on unintended targets. Collateral damage is an inevitable part of war, our military leaders claim. This war momentum catches me speechless but I'm thinking. I remember where I was when I found out about the atrocity. At 8:00 am September 11, 2001, I walked into the classroom at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where I teach Health Psychology. From my peripheral vision I saw the plane cut through the tower and motioned to the students to shut off the TV. My first fleeting thought was: "This Hollywood special effect in the classroom is inappropriate." Then the students filled me in. Stunned, I told them that this was no time to give my lecture. Instead I would show them a short segment of a video. After only a brief segment, I stopped the tape and wound my way to a topic that I have thought and written about for the last fifteen years: Chaos and Complexity Theory. The students seemed to follow me without difficulty. Remaining classes at the University were officially canceled that day. When classes resumed on Thursday of that week, I told the students: "We better just continue our work here. The knowledge you are gathering leads to your degree. It can contribute to your career, your growth and even your wisdom. Apart from giving blood, this is perhaps the most sensible concrete strategy to follow." Now, weeks later, I read the Los Angeles Times, give a neighbor a ride, listen to the news and, late at night, I turn on Charlie Rose, the person in the media I trust most. I go about teaching as if nothing has happened, except I give the students a bit more slack when they can't make their exam or they beg me to postpone it a week. Little seems to have changed but that is an illusion. I wonder: Do I have a container for the uncertainties we are facing? I admit some time after the attack I suddenly felt a jolt of pure pleasure when I realized that the climate in the United States seems to have dramatically changed since I arrived here in 1965, in the middle of the Vietnam War. I am struck by how our nation is absorbing the horrendous events of September 11. Would any other nation be in a position to respond as we have and would we have been able to respond in the Seventies and Eighties with the same vigor? Besides, which country has a cool two hundred billion dollars surplus to stimulate an economy and to spend on recovery efforts? "We have awakened a slumbering giant," a Japanese general supposedly said, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The sequelae of the September 11th attacks are revealing the contemporary nature of the United States- this huge country with stakeholders whose ancestors came from everywhere. Our knowledge-perhaps we can call it incipient wisdom- derives from that diversity. Northridge Named a Top Campus for Minority Students the headline of CSUN's bulletin of September 24, proclaimed. Indeed, more than 80% of the maternal grandmothers of my 100 Introductory Psychology students were immigrants to this country. I am struck by our ability and willingness to ponder the complexity of the predicament we find ourselves in as individuals and as a nation, a complexity intricately bound to uncertainty. What about the variety in the following excerpts from the Opinion section of the L.A. Times of September 23? The Muslim Ally Within : "The West's Muslim communities…must be heard and honored as teachers." - Jack Miles A Pure, High Note of Anguish :" There are a hundred ways to be a good citizen, and one of them is to look finally at the things we don't want to see… Some people believe our country needed to learn how to hurt in this new way. This is such a large lesson, so hatefully, wrongfully taught, but many people before us have learned honest truths from wrongful deaths." - Barbara Kingsolver, novelist War : "Those who worry about us becoming more like our enemies miss the more immediate problem-of our becoming dust." - Drew Limsky and Peace : "We are at war, they [our leaders] said. And I thought: They have learned nothing, absolutely nothing from the history of the 20th century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity." -Howard Zinn Uncertainty is also fostered by enormous amounts of information. Today, virtually everybody in this country and across many countries has access to the Worldwide Web and the plethora of data it dishes up, credible and less than credible. When three liberal guests from The Nation take perfectly sensible, but variable positions during a recent Charlie Rose interview, they trigger my personal query. Each expresses an element of truth. All elements of truths from these and other sources define a terrain marked by uncertainty. I recognize that terrain in my friends and myself. On many a morning I even awaken from a dream of gentle uncertainty. In plain daylight I catch myself with a wait- and- see attitude. So much is in flux right now, so much precariously balanced. No wonder few of us can make up our minds what the best course of action is. The government expresses certainty about purpose and promises success. President Bush has taken action. He defined the attack, initially cautioned us to wait for evidence about the perpetrators, he then started the war. Steps seem to be calibrated more or less carefully, as far as one can speak of "careful" with daisy-cutter carpet-bombing. Decisions are being weighed. Many variables are going into the equation. Yet, we learn about uncertainties every day; they remain the guiding principles for any thoughtful individual. How to reconcile these contradictions? I have been a neuroscientist throughout my entire career. Granted, I studied clinical psychology as well, and since 1978 I have been a writer of what is best called autobiographical fiction and non-fiction. However, my strongest identity is that of a scientist and as such, I have been steeped in the prevailing Newtonian scientific model. Most of what students at CSUN learn as undergraduates in such courses as Psychopharmacology, Brain and Behavior, Health Psychology and Behavioral Disorders is based on this model. Besides it is so pervasive in our society that we are not always aware how it influences our behavior and thinking. James Hillman (1999) captures my concern as follows: "Ideas we have and do not know we have, have us." (1) I list this statement as one of three take home messages for my undergraduate students. I am interested in making them aware of how the unquestioned adoption of the Newtonian model can prevent us from probing a larger whole, a deeper truth. I collect articles and popular books on atomic physics, but this does not mean I have a complete grasp of the subject. I was educated in the Netherlands during the first twenty years after the Second World War. At that time, some of the material on Einstein's theory of relativity or particle physics had entered our curriculum. I still remember how, during final oral exam in high school, an exam whose successful passing was to assure me entrance into the hallowed halls of the university, when asked what I wanted to talk about, I boldly, but incautiously, stated: the cyclotron. There was an uncommonly long silence in the room, which afforded me an opportunity to look at the two middle-aged men sitting opposite me. One was my teacher, an extremely quiet, expressionless man, for whom a wan smile was an extravagant loss of control. I saw him raising his eyebrows almost imperceptibly, first at me and then at the examiner. The other man, unknown to both of us, was the ultimate judge of my knowledge of physics, while my teacher was just there to elicit my best performance. In retrospect, I am sure two heads simultaneously wondered why they hadn't heard the words, steam iron. During the silence this stranger took a few puffs from his pipe and said finally, "sure," thereby sealing my fate. I know that I passed that particular exam, but since then I have become a hell of a lot more cautious about volunteering any expose in particle physics. I recognize the peculiar path I have taken. Throughout, I seem to have straddled two domains: Europe and the United States, neuroscience and clinical psychology. Besides, I am a woman. I am not surprised that I find myself trying to build a bridge between the Newtonian and the Chaos and Complexity models. This brings me to the role of models in science. We shouldn't underestimate their power. Historically, Darwin's model of evolution, for instance, was followed by the idea of the survival of the fittest. This idea has guided our behavior as a metaphor. Its influence has fostered competitiveness; it bolsters many institutions in our Western world, and it justifies the death of entire categories such as species, languages, people and civilizations as "not fit enough to survive." Can the Chaos and Complexity models function as a metaphor and shift our way of thinking about the universe? If it does, it will almost certainly bring us a degree of humility that seems to have left us with the ascendance of the prevailing Newtonian model that promises unlimited control. The Chaos and Complexity models bring us a realization that there are large domains in which uncertainty reigns, where we cannot predict and control. Toward the end of my scientific career, I turn to these very new scientific maps. What is it about these theories that so intrigue me? In neuroscience, an unspoken assumption is that virtually everything ultimately can be predicted and controlled. We just have to wait for more powerful tools and larger databases. Is there a better, recent example than the genome project spawning an unlimited optimism about genetic engineering and the eradication of all diseases, including the 'mean' gene that produces violence? I always refer students to a second important take-home message: The map is not the territory. From listing as many maps of Los Angeles as there are students in the class from Thomas guides to maps of cemeteries, sewer systems and stars' homes, students grasp readily the meaning of this statement. No map can capture all of what Los Angeles represents. Similarly, the Newtonian map only represents one take on the universe, albeit an important one. In class, we contrast the Newtonian map with this new map and examine the goals of science and the assumptions of each of these maps. With both maps, we aim to describe and categorize phenomena and explain them. With the Newtonian map, we wish to predict and control phenomena as well. We use what is called reductionism, where we try to examine smaller and smaller units that make up a phenomenon in the hope that once we understand and can control the smaller units, we automatically understand and control the larger phenomena from which they were taken. We look for a gene that could explain violence, for instance, and ultimately try to predict and control it. So far we have not succeeded in this task, but will the future bring the solution using this strategy? Many phenomena do not yield fully to this reductionist strategy. First, once you understand the separate parts and you put them back together, you don't necessarily understand the whole phenomenon. The whole is not the sum of its parts. Take music, an orchestra. We can hear the flute separate from the piano, separate from the violin section, yet there is an infinite number of renditions of Beethoven's Piano Concerto # 5, the Emperor. With each orchestra, each conductor, each individual musician, each concert hall and each listener, the emerging sound will be different. Second, some wholes are difficult to break down as parts; there are wholes that one cannot even visualize, no matter what tool is used, except individual consciousness. What is the whole of the joint creative energy in this classroom on Tuesday morning at 11:35? What of last week's at 11:45? How to break that energy into parts to understand it? How are we going to agree on those wholes, let alone their constituent parts to study them? Even though we have come a long way in taking the brain apart, that does not mean that we know fully where and how consciousness is organized. What about the unconscious or imagination? The reductionist model works extremely well for certain scales and these scales encompass both small and large physical phenomena. For instance, we have obtained estimates of the age of the Universe, about 14 billion years. At the other end of the scale there is the field of nano-technology that deals with tiny objects the size of molecules and atoms. In relation to the size of our world, a nanometer is the size of a grape. There are art and engineering there. For instance, a team of Japanese engineers created a statue of a three-dimensional bull the size of a red blood cell etched in transparent plastic. This statue measures 10x7 micrometers, where a micrometer is one thousands of a millimeter. I have seen the picture on the Web, enlarged of course, another product of our reductionist strategy. Scientists are also working on nerve chips, electronic circuits grown from silicon, and nerve cells that ultimately might yield brain-repair chips. I have found the reductionist model wanting in my everyday life, especially with a category of phenomena that emerges from the physical brain and its components: feelings, emotions, thoughts and communication. We can blithely say they are just abstractions, our own constructs that we have defined, but tell that to a person who has just lost a loved one. At times, these phenomena have a far greater reality in our personal lives than blood cells, or the universe. The present seems to be such a time. In other words, my problem does not stem from our use of the reductionist model in the physical world, it stems from using this model for a group of important phenomena while the assumptions of the model are not fully satisfied. We can pretend that the assumptions are satisfied and still learn a great deal about a phenomenon with the reductionist model. That is what we have typically done. We can learn about emotions with a questionnaire, with a lie detector test or a brain scan perhaps, but do we capture something that even remotely resembles what each of us is experiencing from the inside out? The extraordinary fear induced by seeing the planes hit the Twin Towers? The subtleties of emotions elicited by reading about the fabric of life of the ordinary citizens who became victims of the September 11 attacks or who now daily become victims in the bombing of Afghanistan? Some people choose religion. For the time being, I wish to stick with science. If there is one overriding message in these September 11th events, it is how interconnected we are in this global community. We are truly behaving as a whole. The Chaos and Complexity models try to describe and explain phenomena as a whole, without breaking them apart into pieces. Control, predictability and certainty are low on the hit parade in these theories. In fact, none of these can ever be fully attained. Why would anybody want to bother with the Chaos and Complexity models, if they revolve around uncertainty with little confidence to predict and control what you can describe? Wouldn't we want to eradicate terrorist activity entirely? We want certainty. Indeed President Bush promises us a war to accomplish this. Granted the war will be long, but we will prevail, he assures us. For me, the new scientific maps of Chaos and Complexity help maintain my faith in science. Uncertainty and change are inherent in my encounter with life. I want to explore how these models that derive from physics, mathematics and computer science can offer us metaphors to integrate the multitude of provisional truths that we encounter at this moment in history. Can they offer clues for negotiating our uncertain, changing world? Unique to the Chaos and Complexity models is that they can handle change quite well. "You can't step in the same river twice," said Heraclitus; for most people this saying does not need belaboring. We know it at the most fundamental level. True, I blissfully experience myself as a constant in a stream of changes, even if I know that this constancy is an illusion. However, a perpetual change of conditions in and around me is basic to my experience, and in that sense the Chaos and Complexity models reflect my reality faithfully. During my first encounter with Chaos theory, I had no clue what it meant. I was invited by Professor David Lloyd to attend a small, intimate conference in Ireland. In the letter of reply I told him that my life was chaotic as it was, and I couldn't afford to make it into a field of study. I had met Dr. Lloyd in Paris in the winter of 1985 at another conference. Dr. Stupfel, the organizer of the Paris meeting, was a charmingly absent-minded man, the prototype of the professor. He seemed to survive the concrete demands of everyday living only through programming by a small cadre of competent women, who reminded him of such small details as drinking his coffee. Even the women couldn't totally avert mistakes, however, as I had discovered the night before when I had arrived after midnight at a supposedly reserved hotel room. The clerk advised me pleasantly that the professor had made no reservation, in fact the professor was entirely unknown to him and his hotel was regrettably full, as were all others in the general neighborhood. I need not go into my response to my first taste of chaos. The meeting was to be held in a miniature dome with ornate, old-fashioned wooden benches, with faded burgundy, velour pillows; such as the ones I remember from my childhood church visits. It was as if we were in an abbey with the brothers about to confer under the guidance of the abbot. I looked around me and indeed it was as usual a brotherhood, twenty-five men and three women were seated in two rows each, the last row slightly elevated compared to the front one. The first speaker was the head of the French Naval Atomic program, a mathematician, who lectured on the mathematics of waves… perhaps. I must admit, he could have given all the secrets of the French nuclear program away and I wouldn't have noticed. Between his accent and his subject matter, I tried for a while to follow the "thes," the "ands" and the "thats", but soon gave up and indulged in my favorite past time under such circumstances, observation. It soon became clear from doodles, yawns and nods that practically nobody else would have noticed had he given the shop away. The discussion after his paper was very brief and most everybody was relieved that they could look forward to more accessible topics. But this hope was short-lived, for one after the other papers with such titles as "Reversible Molecular Modifications of Proteins as a Basis for Enzymatic Rhythms" were delivered in a funny hybrid of English and French. It required a lot of creative listening and a willingness to flow with the sounds of words alone, with the meager reward of only time-lapsed comprehending. The slides were sometimes the only intelligible portion of the presentation, as long as they weren't described. Ironically, however, in contrast with the sophistication of the topic, the media equipment was of the shakiest variety. Despite the fact that one PhD was uniquely assigned the responsibility for this piece of technology, or perhaps, because of it, it broke down with every new speaker. The best part of that morning was the lunch with pates, Camembert and Brie cheeses, cold cuts and a variety of fresh fruits and salads. During the afternoon the papers on rhythms of O2 consumptions and yeast cells became finally more accessible. By the mid-Eighties, I had had more than a decade of exposure to feminist thinking. Thus it didn't escape me that the participants in this conference on biological rhythms automatically assumed hierarchical control: one nucleus in the brain was believed to regulate the day-night differences in heart rate and breathing, for instance, and all other rhythms were subordinate to that nucleus. This again testifies to the power of models. But there are limits to this top-down organization. The scientific terms Chaos and Complexity refer to the fact that in nature, and this includes human nature, there is an underlying inter-connectedness. I remember my baffling realization that I had no other choice than to accept the fact that any and all phenomena are part of a larger whole. Most if not all parts are really wholes. Wholes are the essence. Many wholes display complex rather than simple behaviors, and thus to a significant extent cannot be predicted or controlled. A further comparison of the two models reveals that the Newtonian, reductionist model works on the assumption of linearity or proportionality. Take the example of our ubiquitous thermostat. The temperature in a room tends to increase in a steady, linear fashion. When the heat goes up too much, a sensing mechanism kicks the switch that shuts off the furnace. When it gets too cool, the furnace is lit again and the temperature rises. This negative feedback loop can keep us within a comfortable, stable range, both literally and metaphorically. Institutions such as the middle class promote, by means of comfort, the stability that governments seek; citizens having too much to lose are less likely to protest government decrees and interventions. Chaos and Complexity theories assume that many physical processes do not follow a linear pattern. It is easy to find examples where linearity and proportionality are not present. If 70 degrees Fahrenheit is a pleasant room temperature, 140 degrees is not twice as pleasant. Non-linearity is derived from a mixture of positive and negative feedback loops. With positive feedback, effects cascade. The term positive feedback is counter-intuitive because the cascade can be either in a positive or negative direction. The responses of the various nations behind the Iron Curtain, that followed the falling of the Berlin wall, most considered a cascade in a positive direction. A stock market crash most would consider a cascade in a negative direction. Both are subsumed under a positive feedback loop, because the effects exceed a familiar, homeostatic comfort zone. Confidence in the stock market was shaken before the September 11th events, but those events aggravated our worldwide lack of confidence. Markets all across the globe, which are made up of individuals who trust or mistrust what is to happen economically, responded to the events. For the first couple of days after it opened the stock market kept falling, until government interventions such as proposals for stimulus packages, interest rate drops and speeches by the president, restored a modicum of confidence. At that point negative feedback loops began to control individuals' buying and selling behavior again. What if we extrapolate this non-linearity to other psychological behavior: Our sudden mistrust of people of Middle Eastern descent? The rumor mill and our fears get the better of us and despite stern warnings from our leaders, the hate crime rate toward these individuals shoots up exponentially. Our government detains more than a thousand people feared to have associations with terrorism. The checks and balances that protect civil liberties are thrown out in sweeping new legislation and government decrees: the lawyer-prisoner conversation is suddenly not confidential any longer, but now can be recorded and listened to by the authorities. A negative feedback mechanism that is meant to prevent excesses is at least temporarily supplanted with measures that promise much less protection. Top down and local control refer to how wholes are organized. Most of our societies, our institutions, our companies, even our families have a top down organization. Presidents or Kings, CEO's and Fathers have the most power invested in their roles. This top down model is ubiquitous, and as I alluded above, it pervades even thinking about how the brain works. It reveals itself in such ideas as the brain controls the body and the higher brain centers control the lower brain centers. Newer findings shed doubt about the ubiquity of this top-down arrangement. A revealing computer simulation looked at the behavior of a flock of birds. When you watch a flock, one single bird seems to lead it and the remainder follows. In reality, however, the individual birds anywhere in the flock with a kind of "bird consciousness", are paying close attention to their neighbors. They maintain a very stable distance to the birds right next and before them. Thus, local control contributes fundamentally to the preservation of the formation. (2) Appearances can be misleading. In the wake of the September 11th disaster, young and old have initiated actions everywhere. We refer to it as grass-roots activity. This is to be totally expected because if there is any country in the world where initiative is rewarded it is the United States. Perhaps this is a way to describe democracy. Telling are the words of Barbara Lee, Democrat from Oakland, California, and the only member of the Legislature who voted against going to war: "I say, when you disagree, you are demonstrating the beauty of this democratic system. And that's the true American way. I want to bring the perpetrators to justice, and I want to see a peaceful world." How do physicists determine whether they are operating in the domain of Chaos and Complexity? There are certain footsteps. This is meant in the most literal sense. When we hike in Yosemite and come across the footprint of a bear we conclude: this is bear territory. Similarly, we come across footprints of Chaos and Complexity. Here are some: (1) sensitivity to initial conditions, and (2) self-similarity. Sensitivity to initial conditions is also referred to as the butterfly effect. A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon area can affect the weather in the Los Angeles basin. Or, small stimuli can bring about huge changes. How does this relate to the September 11th attack? Our leadership counsels us to go about our ordinary business so that the terrorists do not win, but to deny the magnitude of the terrorists' effect is to embrace a lie. The government refers to it as ripple effect but that seems to be a true misnomer. The consequences from this September 11th event, the work of a mere nineteen suicide bombers, have affected truly billions. The concept of self-similarity is not intuitively clear. While my students do not know the technical term, they know a distinct manifestation: fractal images, the very colorful swirly pictures that are often encountered online and have been generated by an iteration of a fairly uncomplicated formula. In nature, self-similarity is found, for instance, in the irregular outline of the California coast as seen in a satellite photo. A closer picture won't capture as much of the coast, but will exhibit a similar irregularity. If one focuses upon a yet shorter piece of the coast, a remarkable similarity with the original capricious coastline is obvious, and a car leaving a mark on Highway One past Big Sur, would draw an irregular pattern very much the same as each of the previous pictures that were based on larger scales. This similarity is referred to as self-similarity across different scales. One can extrapolate this to a psychological idea. I typically ask students to rate their mood on a scale of one to ten every thirty minutes from the time they get up. Many minor events such as having to wait for the bathroom, a phone call saying that the ride won't be appearing, somebody honking at a traffic light, a friendly greeting, notice of a good grade, a canceled class and the like will make for a jagged looking graph. If one did this instead of every half hour, every three hours, or every day, week, year, or decade for that matter, one would find an equally jagged-looking line for each of these time scales. Expect to find the micro in the macro and vice versa is another way of stating this idea. With that metaphor, wouldn't you expect problems in the global community to be similar to those in the nation, the community and the family? Perhaps the problems between nations are even similar to problems we encounter within ourselves where warring factions prevail sometimes. Once we manage to see global problems more like family or intra-individual problems, in other words discover the micro in the macro, many of us women become experts in domains that we typically, but not wisely, have left for males to solve. Once we make that shift, we gain confidence in our own voices again. How have we learned to build a coalition in the family, how do we learn to build a coalition in the soul? I'm reminded of Eleanor Roosevelt's saying: "When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" Trying to make decisions in families can be a lot messier than making them in science. Certainty and control in families and our inner worlds are more often than not, elusive. I remind my students and myself that failing to control, when control is achievable is not wise but trying to control when control is impossible is foolish as well. How does one arrive at the right balance? It may take a lifetime to learn when to control and direct, when to let go and surrender. Uncertainty underlies the novel, the creative. "Chaos is nature's creativity," wrote John Briggs and David Peat (1999). (3) While the Chaos and Complexity models tell me that uncertainty is to be expected, I do not consider myself absolved from responsibility. I am one of millions of creative individuals thinking and acting. What would be some other concrete implications from using both the Newtonian and the Chaos and Complexity as models for negotiating the uncertain world? For one, let us use the reductionist model to its utmost. Surely, that model can be exploited to lessen the inequities in this world revolving around hunger, disease and education. Universal education can be achieved - for the women in Afghanistan and the world, for the poor and illiterate in every country. True, we are not all reading on the same page in this world literally and metaphorically. Some people haven't even learned to read yet. In this and many other countries, however, many individuals will recognize their own uncertainty about the bombing campaign with so much loss of innocent lives. At the very least we ask: Is it wise to resume it now in Afghanistan or elsewhere? I would find myself a hypocrite if I did not admit that my family and I were overjoyed when the Canadian "Tommies" liberated The Netherlands in 1945; that I still feel grateful that many men and women gave their lives to stop the Nazis. Yet, in this day and age, I don't expect most solutions from proportional force: that an equally strong physical force can eradicate the defined strong evil. Instead, small changes can bring about large effects. It behooves us to search for these pivotal small changes of the kind Rosa Parks exemplified when she refused to move to the back of the bus. In the meantime I am reminded that if nineteen fanatics can affect billions of people, a similar number can have the same magnitude of effect toward a more equitable and peaceful world. And here is another message from Chaos and Complexity. When the physical heart is beating extremely regularly, in other words, when a fixed heart rate prevails, death is often imminent. Alive and well, our heart wanders within a fairly wide range, influenced by numerous stimuli from the environment and the brain. This seemingly complex pattern is apparently healthy and protective. Fanaticism and fundamentalism can be compared to the simple fixed heart rate, close to death. There is brittleness in the fundamentalists among us and the fundamentalism within us. One message is important: embrace life's uncertainties and foster tolerance for ambiguity and ambivalence. These uncertainties can be adaptive and healthy. 1 James Hillman, Kinds of Power, page 16, 1995 Doubleday |