Artrite k.way 2008

James Gleick. “Chaos: Making a New Science”. New York: Viking, 1987, pp35-45.

“Seeing things that physicists had learned not to see” . 1
This quote, the last sentence of the article, conflates Gleicks exposition of the scientific and mathematical journey that led to the acceptance and application of chaos theory.

That chaos is embedded within all entities that we thought stable has become accepted to the degree of naming it a new science, is, frankly,a little worrying. I feel somewhat ambivalent about celebrating the new science fact yet, because when you start thinking about it, the world tends to become more and more unstable, and it’s so not what the best therapists tell you to do. Think about it that is.

Thought stopping has become a common tool to help people becoming over-anxious and descending into the hell that’s a full blown panic attack. It works like this.

As soon as a fearful or negative thought comes into your mind it activates an instant and orderly shot of super chemico-hormonal cocktail into the circulatory system, carrying messages for muscles, glands and organs to react just how they’ve been trained to in an emergency. i.e. fight-flight. The thought activates an automatic transmission of information that releases large quantities of adrenalin into the blood stream. This of course feels pretty freaky if you cant discharge it by running or fighting. So. Anxiety increases releasing more adrenaline, enough to push the body into survival mode… blood pressure Increases so that if there’s a major wound you’ve got extra blood to cope. The digestive system has to shut down because it uses too much energy required elsewhere, like in the big running and fighting muscles. So the mouth goes dry and the order is given to dump any digested or half digested food, Up or down the body doesn’t mind. By now youre really freaking out. With all this blood building up the heart has to work faster and deeper, ok, now youre pumpin’ as they say. Then the sweating starts, to cool you down while youre running of course. But because your sitting in the car in morning traffic, hmmm, you feel just a little claustrophobic and it seems that you cant quite breathe in enough air. So you open your mouth and start gulping it in. This in turn totally fucks up the oxygen/carbon-dioxide balance, too much oxygen is really bad for us so more adrenalin is released because the body’s is getting worried now, and the cycle escalates in ever increasing circles until you either get out of your car and walk or run or scream to release some of those powerful chemicals, or because you didn’t recognise your sysmptoms as a panic attack so you drive straight to the hospital because you feel like you’re going to die, or…you simply tell it to stop.2

Thought stopping is a method of reversing the fight-flight process by telling the body that everything’s going to be alright, but in the strongest possible way. So you have to have a few training sessions because the panic process kicks in before you know it and it’s harder to stop when there’s lots of adrenalin rushing around.
So when you feel it start you YELL at yourself out loud or silently, both ways work. You yell STOP, STOP, STOP and immediately chant your little mantra. It has to be positive because the mind is not good at working out mixed messages. For example chanting ‘I’m not scared’ will be picked up by the brain as ‘I scared’, and the adrenalin will be released. So you have to chant something like I AM FINE I AM FINE I AM FINE (HAPPY, OK, GOOD) whatever as long as it’s positive, loud , short and repetitive, it will work. Singing out loud works just as well. Powerful stuff, huh.

What’s this got to do with chaos theory? The thing is that at a only just sub conscious level we always already know that we are in a constant dangerous chaotic out-of-our-control environment.

Take driving for example, being hit by car behind you travelling at 20kph is enough to give you serious whiplash. Your body knows this because you know it. Multiply the possibility of being smashed into by any one of the hundreds cars that come into your personal car space /proximity on any day. The only way that it doesn’t happen is because all those hundreds of drivers have somehow, along with you, managed to keep their vehicles a metre or two from your sides back and front. You trust them and they trust you because that’s how it has to be.

Now if we apply the pendulum experiment, there’s going to be small increments of, or elements of, unknown or immeasurable or unpredictable stuff happening. A car could smash into you at any given moment. That is what you and your body are always already prepared for. We just don’t often think of it consciously because then we would never go out of the house.

It’s not only physicists who learn not to see.

To conclude, I found an abstract that explains more scientifically what I have been trying to say.

“A general bienzymatic cyclic system including two autocatalytic loops is studied and used as a basic design principle for modelling extracellular matrix turnover. Using classical enzyme kinetic rates, the model is Chaos in a bienzymatic cyclic model with two autocatalytic loops
described by a set of four ordinary differential equations and numerically studied by bifurcation diagrams and Poincaré sections. We observe limit-cycle oscillations and chaotic behaviors arising from period-doubling cascades or intermittency. Chaotic oscillations originate from distinct strange attractors that undergo boundary and internal crisis. For some parameter values, the system presents several bistable areas, where a limit cycle coexists with another one or with a strange attractor. The dynamics are qualitatively modified when the weight of the autocatalytic loops on the system varies, resulting in the change in the number of attractors.”3




1 Gleick, James . “Chaos: Making a New Science”. New York: Viking, 1987, pp45.

2 http://www.emedicinehealth.com/panic_attacks/page3_em.htm

3 H. Berry,
Equipe de Recherche sur les Relations Matrice Extracellulaire-Cellules
(ERRMECe), Université de Cergy-Pontoise, 2 avenue A. Chauvin. B.P. 222, Cergy Pontoise Cedex 95302, FranceAccepted 24 February 2003. ; Available online 1 May 2003
Chaos, Solitons & Fractals
Volume 18, Issue 5, December 2003, Pages 1001-1014
.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TJ4-48GVR16-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=19b7538b084ecf62cb22ff24139a9a78