What near-death experiences can teach us about consciousness

from sbs.com.au


13 OCT 2014 - 11:04AM

In 2008, a group of scientists banded together to explore a question usually left to philosophers and theologians: What happens to the mind during — and after — death? The researchers involved in the AWARE study (“AWAreness during REsuscitation”) believe that scientific techniques can shed light on the mysteries of human consciousness and the mind-body connection. So far, they’re hoping that people who experience heart attacks can offer a window into the experience of dying: If their organs stop functioning, they are technically dead; if they recover, they could have a unique perspective on death.

The AWARE team can’t tell us yet just what happens when we die, but the first part of their study has just been published in a journal called Resuscitation. The study — led by Sam Parnia, an assistant professor of medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook — spanned four years, 15 hospitals, three countries, and more than 2,000 cases of cardiac arrest. Of the 2,060 patients Parnia and his colleagues tracked, 330 survived the heart attack; of these, 140 were willing — and well enough — to be interviewed about their experience. Just over two thirds of the interviewees were male; their average age was 64, though they ranged in age from 21 to 94.

None of these patients showed clinical signs of consciousness (like opening their eyes or responding verbally) while receiving CPR. Of those who were interviewed, 61 percent admitted they didn’t remember anything from their period of unconsciousness, but the rest — 55 people — claimed to recall details from this time. (The responses didn’t vary significantly by age or gender.)

Parnia was able to identify a few recurring themes in their memories. The most common motifs include fear, violence, and “a feeling of being persecuted.” More traditional (and pleasant) after-life images like family, animals, plants, and a bright light appeared as well. Five percent said scenes from their past came back to them; 22 percent reported a feeling of “peace or pleasantness”; and a further 9 percent had feelings of joy. Seven percent felt surrounded by a brilliant light; 8 percent believed they’d encountered a “mystical being”; and 13 percent felt separated from their body.

Of everyone who said they remembered something from the time they were unconscious, seven patients claimed detailed memories, and two more had specific auditory or visual memories. One of these patients became too ill to follow up, but the other — a 57-year-old social worker — accurately described the hospital scene from when he was ostensibly unconscious (the beeping of a machine, the physical appearance of doctors who attended to him, the administration of the automated external defibrillator that restarted his heart). Parnia believes this patient experienced about three minutes of consciousness after his heart stopped beating — even though, as he told The Telegraph, the brain usually shuts down 20 to 30 seconds after the heart stops. 

Based on his research, Parnia argues for a more fluid definition of death. He says we should think of it as a “potentially reversible process” rather than a “specific moment” in time: Doctors classify the same set of symptoms — the cessation of vital functions — as death if the patient doesn’t recover, but as just a heart attack if he does. The AWARE team members are not the only scientists forcing us to reconsider what it means to be dead; cryogenic preservationists, for instance, believe we may be able to freeze ourselves for resuscitation at some point down the line. 

Though Parnia has spent years promoting the (pretty outlandish) idea that death is reversible, his conclusion in the paper is relatively mild: He just wants people to take his field seriously. “The recalled experience surrounding death merits a genuine investigation without prejudice,” he writes.

Even so, most of the scientific community isn’t interested in this type of inquiry. “There's a reason that these events are called ‘near’ death experiences,” says Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, an organization devoted to debunking superstition in science. “The people who have [near death experiences] are not actually dead,” Shermer says. “In that murky gray area between life and death, the brain is still functioning on some level and can therefore experience something. … If NDEs were evidence for life after death” — as some journalists are extrapolating — “then why do only 42 percent (in this study) have such experiences, and if they represented some real place on the other side, then why do the experiences vary so much?”

Christopher French, a psychology professor at Goldsmith’s, University of London, doesn’t doubt that people have “profound experiences, sometimes including the out-of-body component, when they are in life-threatening situations” — but he explains them as a “complex hallucinatory experience.” The accounts described by Parnia’s patients, French says, may come from people who aren’t really unconscious: They “may well reflect nothing more than patients regaining consciousness and forming a mental image of what is going on based upon what they can hear.” Parnia’s argument rests on the assumption that the brain can’t go on without the heart, but, according to French, doctors aren’t so sure. “We do not know how long the brain can carry on functioning and even maintain some form of consciousness after the heart has stopped beating,” he says. Whatever Parnia — and the public — may want to believe, a few extra minutes of consciousness does not answer any existential questions.

Are We Really Conscious?

from nytimes



OCT. 10, 2014

OF the three most fundamental scientific questions about the human condition, two have been answered.

First, what is our relationship to the rest of the universe? Copernicus answered that one. We’re not at the center. We’re a speck in a large place.

Second, what is our relationship to the diversity of life? Darwin answered that one. Biologically speaking, we’re not a special act of creation. We’re a twig on the tree of evolution.

Third, what is the relationship between our minds and the physical world? Here, we don’t have a settled answer. We know something about the body and brain, but what about the subjective life inside? Consider that a computer, if hooked up to a camera, can process information about the wavelength of light and determine that grass is green. But we humans also experience the greenness. We have an awareness of information we process. What is this mysterious aspect of ourselves?

Many theories have been proposed, but none has passed scientific muster. I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.

Imagine a group of scholars in the early 17th century, debating the process that purifies white light and rids it of all colors. They’ll never arrive at a scientific answer. Why? Because despite appearances, white is not pure. It’s a mixture of colors of the visible spectrum, as Newton later discovered. The scholars are working with a faulty assumption that comes courtesy of the brain’s visual system. The scientific truth about white (i.e., that it is not pure) differs from how the brain reconstructs it.

The brain builds models (or complex bundles of information) about items in the world, and those models are often not accurate. From that realization, a new perspective on consciousness has emerged in the work of philosophers like Patricia S. Churchland and Daniel C. Dennett. Here’s my way of putting it:

How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.

You might object that this is a paradox. If awareness is an erroneous impression, isn’t it still an impression? And isn’t an impression a form of awareness?

But the argument here is that there is no subjective impression; there is only information in a data-processing device. When we look at a red apple, the brain computes information about color. It also computes information about the self and about a (physically incoherent) property of subjective experience. The brain’s cognitive machinery accesses that interlinked information and derives several conclusions: There is a self, a me; there is a red thing nearby; there is such a thing as subjective experience; and I have an experience of that red thing. Cognition is captive to those internal models. Such a brain would inescapably conclude it has subjective experience.

I concede that this approach is counterintuitive. One reason is that it seems to leave a gap in the logic: Why would the brain waste energy computing information about subjective awareness and attributing that property to itself, if the brain doesn’t in fact have this property?

This is where my own work comes in. In my lab at Princeton, my colleagues and I have been developing the “attention schema” theory of consciousness, which may explain why that computation is useful and would evolve in any complex brain. Here’s the gist of it:

Take again the case of color and wavelength. Wavelength is a real, physical phenomenon; color is the brain’s approximate, slightly incorrect model of it. In the attention schema theory, attention is the physical phenomenon and awareness is the brain’s approximate, slightly incorrect model of it. In neuroscience, attention is a process of enhancing some signals at the expense of others. It’s a way of focusing resources. Attention: a real, mechanistic phenomenon that can be programmed into a computer chip. Awareness: a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color.

In this theory, awareness is not an illusion. It’s a caricature. Something — attention — really does exist, and awareness is a distorted accounting of it.

One reason that the brain needs an approximate model of attention is that to be able to control something efficiently, a system needs at least a rough model of the thing to be controlled. Another reason is that to predict the behavior of other creatures, the brain needs to model their brain states, including their attention. This theory pulls together evidence from social neuroscience, attention research, control theory and elsewhere.

Almost all other theories of consciousness are rooted in our intuitions about awareness. Like the intuition that white light is pure, our intuitions about awareness come from information computed deep in the brain. But the brain computes models that are caricatures of real things. And as with color, so with consciousness: It’s best to be skeptical of intuition.

Michael S. A. Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, is the author of “Consciousness and the Social Brain.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 12, 2014, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Are We Really Conscious?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

The extraordinary beginnings of human consciousness

from abc.net.au

Our consciousness sets us apart from all other life. Yet, its evolutionary appearance highlights the accidental nature of our origins, writes Darren Curnoe.

It's estimated that up to five per cent of the DNA of people living in North Africa and outside of Africa today comprises Neanderthal genes (Source: Nikola Solic/Reuters)

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The beginning of our species is one of the most significant events in the Earth's — some say the universe's — history. At its centre is answering big questions like the beginnings of consciousness.

The 20th century luminary of biology, Julian Huxley, believed the evolutionary arrival of humans was so profound an event in Earth's history that he dubbed the geological period when it occurred the "Psychozoic Era".

That is, the geological era of the soul or mind.

Contemporary cosmologists like Paul Davies have even argued that the evolution of humans gave the universe self-awareness.

We humans have always thought of ourselves as rather unique in the natural world — even special — a vast intellectual gulf seemingly separating us from all other life.

To reinforce this, we have constructed cosmologies placing humans at the centre of the cosmos: the Sun orbiting the Earth — as seen for example in Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe.

This view changed of course with Copernicus who showed some 1,300 years later that the Sun was at the centre of universe; well the solar system more accurately, the Earth being just one of several celestial or extraterrestrial bodies orbiting the Sun.

Four hundred years later came the space race. Humans, through the Apollo missions, ventured beyond our Earthly — our evolutionary — home, setting foot on our extraterrestrial neighbour.

We were struck by our seeming aloneness and insignificance in the universe: our pale blue dot of a home set against the vast black expanse of the universe.

This event also marked the serious search for life in outer space, and there's something rather poignant about our desire to see just whether we ARE actually alone in the universe.

So far we seem to be one of a kind. Yet, it hasn't always been this way, being alone I mean.

Living with the cousins

Our ancestors shared the planet with other intelligent life not so long ago — the blink of an eye in evolutionary time — with creatures a lot like us.

Our ancestors shared their world with them for most of our evolutionary history stretching back to around eight million years ago, to the beginning of two-footed apes.

Being alone, as we are today, is the unusual state of affairs.

You've undoubtedly heard of the Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis? They lived up until just 40,000 years ago.

The so-called 'Hobbit' — or Homo floresiensis — from the island of Flores. It lived up until around 17,000 years ago.

Or, the Red Deer Cave people, one of my own discoveries with my colleague Ji Xueping, from southwest China. Cousins that lived even more recently, up until about 10,000 years ago.

Arrival of the mind

Our species evolved only about 200,000 years ago: probably the newest arrival on the evolutionary scene.

Yet, if we look at the evidence for the behavior our ancestors — the archaeological record — we can scarcely distinguish the behaviour of sapiens-humans from our cousins.

That is, until somewhere in the geological window of time around 50, 60 or 70 thousand years ago. Roughly three quarters of the way through our species' evolution.

At this time, we saw a major event which archaeologists have dubbed the 'Human Revolution'.

At this time we saw the first examples of jewellery being made.

Also at this time, humans took their first steps out of Africa — the humans who went on to the found the world's living populations across the globe.

People lived for the first time in previously unoccupied areas; like rainforests, intensely arid zones including deserts, high mountain ranges, and they quickly settled the Arctic region.

East Asia was also settled about 50,000 years ago for the first time by humans, as was the island continent of Australia.

All of this occurred about the time our kind left Africa. Not earlier, and sometimes a little later. And despite the fact we had existed as an unremarkable species for around 150,000 years.

We saw the first cave paintings at this time, in Europe, Asia and Australia. Symbolic representations of the internal and external world through vivid paintings of cave and rock shelter walls.

And we saw a much wider range of tools being made, with rapid innovation in tool form and use. Tools called 'microliths': tiny tools that replaced in many places the bigger, chunkier tools made by our earlier ancestors and relatives.

In short, we saw humans in all of our glory: with our vivid internal world and imagination, and living in virtually every nook and cranny the planet has to offer.

Gift from a departing relative

So, why the 'Human Revolution' then and not some other time during the 200,000-year span of our species?

We can piece together the evidence to develop a rather surprising scenario: a truly remarkable narrative of our origins, based on the latest science.

At about 60,000 years ago, when our human ancestors were beginning to make their journey to settle new parts of Africa and the rest the Old World the planet was a very different place to today.

It was a world inhabited by our close relatives: cousins living in parts of Africa, and in Asia and Europe.

Now, something rather extraordinary seems to have occurred about this time, as has been shown by the work of some very clever geneticists.

When our ancestors moved into these new places they did something that seems to be a first in human evolution — they mated with the locals.

Now our genome, it turns out, is like a patchwork quilt. It's estimated that up to five per cent of the DNA of people living in North Africa and outside of Africa today comprises Neanderthal genes.

And a similar value also for the Denisovans — a mysterious species from Siberia we know from a single tooth and finger bone, but also its genome.

It might strike you as odd that different species interbreed. But, in fact, between species mating is common in nature and is actually an important source of evolutionary innovation right across life.

The Denisovans, for example, probably gave us a raft of genes associated with immune function and genes that allowed people living today in the Himalayas to survive at high altitude.

Accidental origin of us

There's another really fascinating and potentially profound genetic gift they gave us on their way out: a variant of the microcephalin gene.

This gene plays a key role in brain size in humans and there is ample evidence it has been under strong selection in recent evolution.

Now, genetic studies suggest this gene may actually have been added to our genome through interspecies interbreeding with a close cousin. Maybe even with the Neanderthals.

I don't wish to suggest this is THE gene for consciousness, for without doubt something as complex as the human mind or consciousness must involve multiple genes or even networks of genes.

But, the microcephalin gene is likely to be a key gene, without which consciousness might not exist.

So, it could be that the psychozoic of Huxley, or the universal consciousness of Davies, resulted from the incorporation of a gene we received from a close evolutionary relative.

Isn't this the ultimate irony? We get the gene, send them to extinction, and claim universal consciousness while we're at it!

Science constantly updates and knowledge progresses. And, without doubt, this story will change as well. But, in the end, this doesn't really matter because it highlights one really important aspect of our evolution.

It is clear that we humans, and our remarkable consciousness, were not planned, nor inevitable, and not built into some design for the universe or the fabric of the cosmos.

Instead we were accidental, our evolution contingent.

The very feature we hold so dearly may in fact result from a chance encounter in a dark alley, even an evolutionary one-night stand.

This article is based on a TEDX Brisbane talk given on 5 October 2014. A longer version is available on Walking on Two Feet.

About the author:Associate Professor Darren Curnoe is an evolutionary biologist at the University of New South Wales. He writes about all aspects of evolution on his blog blog. His work with colleague Ji Xueping is featured in the documentary Enigma Man: A Stone Age History. He also appears regularly on ABC 702.

People still conscious after death, study says

from news.com.au

4 HOURS AGO OCTOBER 08, 2014 10:22AM

• Video
• Image

Dr. Sam Parnia on 'Erasing Death'

PEOPLE may still have consciousness after “death”.

A study involving 2060 patients from 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria has found that patients experience real events for up to a three-minute period after their heart has stopped beating.

Dr Sam Parnia, director of resuscitation research at the State University of New York, explained that it was previously thought that only hallucinatory events were experienced in these circumstances.

These are normally described as out-of-body experiences (OBEs) or near-death experiences (NDEs).

The Awareness during Resuscitation (Aware) study, sponsored by the University of Southampton in the UK, used objective markers to establish whether the experiences were real or hallucinatory.

The results showed that 39 per cent of patients who survived cardiac arrest described a perception of awareness but did not have explicit recall.

A total of 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections, nine per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and two per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBEs with explicit recall of “seeing” and “hearing” events.

And one case was validated and timed using auditory stimuli during cardiac arrest.

“This is significant, since it has often been assumed that experiences in relation to death are likely hallucinations or illusions, occurring either before the heart stops or after the heart has been successfully restarted, but not an experience corresponding with ‘real’ events when the heart isn’t beating,” Dr Parnia said.

“In this case, consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three-minute period when there was no heartbeat. This is paradoxical, since the brain typically ceases functioning within 20 to 30 seconds of the heart stopping and doesn’t resume again until the heart has been restarted.”

Nobel prize in medicine awarded for discovery of brain’s ‘GPS’

from washingtonpost

By Ariana Eunjung Cha and Fred Barbash October 6 at 7:55 AM

Three scientists, including a husband-and-wife team, have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine for deciphering the mechanism in the brain that allows us to find our way around.

The three winners of the world’s most coveted medical research prize are John O’Keefe, who holds both U.S. and British citizenship and is director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Center in Neural Circuits and Behavior at University College London; May-Britt Moser, a professor of neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; and Edward I. Moser of the same university.

All worked on different components of the same problem: how we “orient ourselves in space” and navigate, the Stockholm-based Nobel committee said in announcing the prize Monday. The discovery of what the group called the brain’s “inner GPS” has “solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries.”

O’Keefe discovered the first component of this system in 1971. He found that when he placed rats in certain parts of a room different cells in the brain’s hippocampus – which is believed to be important in functions related to space and memory -- were always activated. He theorized that these areas that he called “place cells” formed a map of the room.

The Mosers, who are from Norway, followed up on that research in 2005, finding what scientists dubbed “grid cells” that make up a coordinate system that allows us to navigate. The couple was researching rats moving in a room when they noticed that another area of the brain, the entorhinal cortex, was activated in a unique spatial pattern that corresponded with the location of the animal’s head and the borders of the room.

Research into the inner workings of the brain has been among the top priorities for the scientific community in recent years. Last year, the European Union launched a 10-year effort to simulate the human brain on supercomputers. And President Obama launched a $100 initiative to build tools to accelerate the pace of brain research – an effort that many believe will be as groundbreaking as the Human Genome Project, which led to the sequencing of the 3 billion base pairs that comprise human DNA.

Last year, two Americans -- James Rothman of Yale University and Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley -- and German-born Thomas Suedhof of Stanford University won the Nobel in medicine for their work on how the body’s cells communicate. The research has had a major impact in our understanding of how the brain transmits signals.

Joshua Sanes, director of Harvard University’s Center for Brain Research, said that while the work by O’Keefe and the Moser is still in the early stages – it has only been done in animals, and it’s unclear whether human brains are set up the same way – it provides fundamental insights into brains and their relation to life.

“It’s about navigational abilities that little kids have, mice have, ants have and honey bees have,” he said. “It’s a very basic evolutionary mental activity that is absolutely critical for many species' survival. How the brain works is maybe the biggest mystery that remains in all the world of the life sciences, and this is a key piece in the puzzle.”

The Nobel winners’ work provides such a fundamental insight into the brain that many neuroscientists are hopeful that the discovery will one day help us find treatments for a host of neurological conditions.

“The studies were of a part of the brain involved in certain neurological disease, such as Alzheimer’s, and getting lost is a symptom of Alzheimer’s,” Sanes explained. “While nobody should be thinking this is on the direct road to a treatment, but it provides a starting point for the first time.”

Emery Brown, a member of the advisory committee for the president’s BRAIN (Brain Research Through Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative, said he expects work building on the three scientists’ discoveries to accelerate over the next few years as scientists try to figure out whether the place and grid cells work the same way in humans.

If it turns out to be the case, he said, the implications are far-reaching.

“You could think of ways to help stimulate areas to enhance memory, to help people who have had brain injuries recover function, maybe even to help preserve function as we grow older,” said Brown, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.​

The Nobel prize in physics will be announced Tuesday, the prize in chemistry on Wednesday and the prize in economics on Oct. 13. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday.

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Three who discovered ‘inner GPS’ win Nobel Prize in Medicine

Three scientists, including a husband-and-wife team, have been awarded this year’s prize for their research on the brain.

Oct. 6, 2014Goran Hansson, right, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, announces the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

View Photo Gallery — Three scientists, including a husband-and-wife team, have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Ariana Eunjung Cha is a national reporter for the Post. She has previously served as the newspaper’s bureau chief in Beijing, Shanghai and San Francisco, a correspondent in Baghdad and as a tech reporter based in Washington.

Fred Barbash, the editor of Morning Mix, is a former National Editor and London Bureau Chief for 

Chaos Theory for Beginners

7. Chaos Theory for Beginners

— An Introduction —

Life finds a way

Dr. Malcom
"Life finds a way"

Remember Jurassic Park? Handsome mathematician Doctor Malcom explaining to pretty Doctor Sattler why he thought it was unwise to have T-rexes and the likes romping around on an island? John Hammond, the annoying owner, promised that nothing could go wrong and that all precautions were taken to ensure the safety of visitors.
Dr. Malcom did not agree. "Life finds a way," he said.

Nature is highly complex, and the only prediction you can make is that she is unpredictable. The amazing unpredictability of nature is what Chaos Theory looks at. Why? Because in stead of being boring and translucent, nature is marvelous and mysterious. And Chaos Theory has managed to somewhat capture the beauty of the unpredictable and display it in the most awesome patterns. Nature, when looked upon with the right kind of eyes, presents herself as one of the most fabulous works of art ever wrought.

What is Chaos Theory?

Fractal landscape

Chaos Theory is a mathematical sub-discipline that studies complex systems. Examples of these complex systems that Chaos Theory helped fathom are earth's weather system, the behavior of water boiling on a stove, migratory patterns of birds, or the spread of vegetation across a continent. Chaos is everywhere, from nature's most intimate considerations to art of any kind. Chaos-based graphics show up all the time, wherever flocks of little space ships sweep across the movie screen in highly complex ways, or awesome landscapes adorn the theater of some dramatic Oscar scene.

Complex systems are systems that contain so much motion (so many elements that move) that computers are required to calculate all the various possibilities. That is why Chaos Theory could not have emerged before the second half of the 20th century.

But there is another reason that Chaos Theory was born so recently, and that is the Quantum Mechanical Revolution and how it ended the deterministic era!

Sigmund Freud

Up to the Quantum Mechanical Revolution people believed that things were directly caused by other things, that what went up had to come down, and that if only we could catch and tag every particle in the universe we could predict events from then on. Entire governments and systems of belief were (and, sadly, are still) founded on these beliefs, and when Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis, he headed out from the idea that malfunctions in the mind are the results of traumas suffered in the past. Regression would allow the patient to stroll down memory lane, pinpoint the sore spot and rub it away with Freud's healing techniques that were again based on linear cause and effect.

Chaos Theory however taught us that nature most often works in patterns, which are caused by the sum of many tiny pulses.

How Chaos Theory was born and why

Edward Lorenz

It all started to dawn on people when in 1960 a man named Edward Lorenz created a weather-model on his computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lorentz' weather model consisted of an extensive array of complex formulas that kicked numbers around like an old pig skin. Clouds rose and winds blew, heat scourged or cold came creeping up the breeches.

Colleagues and students marveled over the machine because it never seemed to repeat a sequence; it was really quite like the real weather. Some even hoped that Lorentz had built the ultimate weather-predictor and if the input parameters were chosen identical to those of the real weather howling outside the Maclaurin Building, it could mimic earth's atmosphere and be turned into a precise prophet.

But then one day Lorentz decided to cheat a little bit. A while earlier he had let the program run on certain parameters to generate a certain weather pattern and he wanted to take a better look at the outcome.

But instead of letting the program run from the initial settings and calculate the outcome, Lorentz decided to start half way down the sequence by inputting the values that the computer had come up with during the earlier run.

The computer that Lorentz was working with calculated the various parameters with an accuracy of six decimals. But the printout gave these numbers with a three decimal accuracy. So in stead of inputting certain numbers (like wind, temperature and stuff like that) as accurate as the computer had them, Lorentz settled for approximations; 5.123456 became 5.123 (for instance). And that puny little inaccuracy appeared to amplify and cause the entire system to swing out of whack.

Exactly how important is all this? Well, in the case of weather systems, it's very important. Weather is the total behavior of all the molecules that make up earth's atmosphere. And in the previous chapters we've established that a tiny particle can not be accurately pin-pointed, due to the Uncertainty Principle! And this is the sole reason why weather forecasts begin to be bogus around a day or two into the future. We can't get an accurate fix on the present situation, just a mere approximation, and so our ideas about the weather are doomed to fall into misalignment in a matter of hours, and completely into the nebulas of fantasy within days. Nature will not let herself be predicted.

Hold that thought (7):

The Uncertainty Principle prohibits accuracy. Therefore, the initial situation of a complex system can not be accurately determined, and the evolution of a complex system can therefore not be accurately predicted.

Attractors

Complex systems often appear too chaotic to recognize a pattern with the naked eye. But by using certain techniques, large arrays of parameters may be abbreviated into one point in a graph. In the little rain-or-sunshine graph above, every point represents a complete condition with wind speed, rain fall, air temperature, etcetera, but by processing these numbers in a certain way they can be represented by one point. Stacking moment upon moment reveals the little graph and offers us some insight in the development of a weather system.

The first Chaos Theorists began to discover that complex systems often seem to run through some kind of cycle, even though situations are rarely exactly duplicated and repeated. Plotting many systems in simple graphs revealed that often there seems to be some kind of situation that the system tries to achieve, an equilibrium of some sort. For instance: imagine a city of 10,000 people. In order to accommodate these people, the city will spawn one supermarket, two swimming pools, a library and three churches. And for argument's sake we will assume that this setup pleases everybody and an equilibrium is achieved. But then the Ben & Jerry's company decides to open an ice cream plant on the outskirts of the town, opening jobs for 10,000 more people. The town expands rapidly to accommodate 20,000 people; one supermarket is added, two swimming pools, one library and three churches and the equilibrium is maintained. That equilibrium is called an attractor.

Now imagine that instead of adding 10,000 people to the original 10,000, 3,000 people move away from the city and 7,000 remain. The bosses of the supermarket chain calculate that a supermarket can only exist when it has 8,000 regular customers. So after a while they shut the store down and the people of the city are left without groceries. Demand rises and some other company decides to build a supermarket, hoping that a new supermarket will attract new people. And it does. But many were already in the process of moving and a new supermarket will not change their plans.

The company keeps the store running for a year and then comes to the conclusion that there are not enough customers and shut it down again. People move away. Demand rises. Someone else opens a supermarket. People move in but not enough. Store closes again. And so on.

This awful situation is also some kind of equilibrium, but a dynamic one. A dynamic kind-of-equilibrium is called a Strange Attractor. The difference between an Attractor and a Strange Attractor is that an Attractor represents a state to which a system finally settles, while a Strange Attractor represents some kind of trajectory upon which a system runs from situation to situation without ever settling down.

The discovery of Attractors was exciting and explained a lot, but the most awesome phenomenon Chaos Theory discovered was a crazy little thing called Self-Similarity. Unveiling Self-Similarity allowed people a glimpse of the magical mechanisms that shape our world, and perhaps even ourselves...

And while you wait for the next web page to load, think about this: A snow flake is an object composed of water molecules. These molecules do not have a common nerve system, DNA or a chief molecule who calls the shots. How do these molecules know where to go and hang in order to form a six pointed star? And where do they get the audacity to form a different one every time? How does one molecule in one leg of the flake know which private design the rest of the gang is cruising for, in other legs of the flake, for the tiny molecule a million miles away?

Not a clue? Go to the next chapter:
Self-Similarity →

Summary 7: Chaos Theory for Beginners; an introduction

• A tiny difference in initial parameters will result in a completely different behavior of a complex system.
• The Uncertainty Principle prohibits accuracy. Therefore, the initial situation of a complex system can not be accurately determined, and the evolution of a complex system can therefore not be accurately predicted.
• Complex systems often seek to settle in one specific situation. This situation may be static (Attractor) or dynamic (Strange Attractor).