I have just finished reading a facinating and in my view, important article on how the brain works. David Robson, in his article in New Scientist, “Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain”, discusses recent research that confirms the theory that the brain is driven by a dynamic tension between stability and orderliness and instability and disorder.
New Scientist1 includes includes an accompanying video clip that in my opinion, is best view after reading the full text of the article.
In a broad sense, the research findings represent an explanation of the properties of emergence that can be applied as an explanatory framework for change process in many types of systems. It is particularly powerful in describing the way in which knowledge is created.
In the section of my blog called “About Three Sigma Systems” I explain this and offer the following illustration of the process.
Catch the Wave
The wave in this illustration represents the ever-moving present in which we experience, do, and observe. Deming’s PDSA is illustrated in a dialectal form that represents our continuous efforts at interpreting the world in an orderly fashion. The dynamic tension between our experience of disorderliness and our construction of orderly explanations (theory) drives the process of knowledge creation forward in the same manner as that described in David Robson’s article.
The process is one in which successive tipping points are reached as each theoretical construction succumbs to the evidence of our “Doing”. With each collapse, small and big, we act to realign experience with theory—to restore order. In this way, knowledge is never repeated, it is only created.
C. I. Lewis, Walter Shewhart, and W. E. Deming were onto this idea of knowledge creation. Dr. Deming referred to it as “continuous improvement”. By understanding this process, it is possible for an enterprise to organize itself to operate closer to the fine line between order and chaos. This is the competitive edge of knowledge creation. In his article, Robson rightly explains this as the process by which “genius” as realized. In Deming’s “continuous improvement”, the genius of the group is realized.
One of my most popular workshops illustrates in very concrete terms, just how the process of walking the line between order and chaos makes things happen and I have been meaning to post it here. I will do so as soon as I can get the content formatted for the Web, so keep an eye-out for it.
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- New Scientist magazine is a science news pub that has stirred up some contraversy with their reporting. Follow the links offered in the article for peer reviewed source materials ↩
A couple of comments. The author (not a scientist, I don’t think) equates randomness with a ‘state of chaos’. I don’t think that’s the same thing at all. One of the elements of Shewhart’s theory is that processes behaving randomly can be predictable (within limits). That is not chaos.
More information on self-organizing networks and the power laws and phase shifts that accompany them can be found studying the topology of networks. Barabasi’s book, “Linked” is a good starting point.
As for the sand piles mentioned in the article, just because we haven’t yet been able to predict when the ‘avalanche’ occurs does not mean that it’s impossible predict. It means we don’t know how to predict it.
Chaos does represent unpredictability. The relationship between randomness and chaos is fuzzy. Chaos implies intractable complexity which is a function in part, of randomness. “True: randomness has been explained in terms of Brownian motion. Is such motion “truly” random or is it better described as chaotic? I am not certain about the truth value in this example.
The idea of prediction within limits is consistent with the sand pile and avalanche examples (both are routinely predicted within limits) as well as with the propagation of the firing of neurons. All of these ate predictable within limits, once the system boundaries are stated. I think that the non-scientist author understand this, as do the authors of the research to which the article refers.
I should also add the idea that we could accurately predict the behavior of chaotic systems’ if we could only measure and calculate enough of the variables and their interactions is, in my view, fundamentally erroneous. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of a chaotic system.
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