The Strange Attractors

denko3d

 You are stuck in a moment and 

you don't know why. 

Can neuroscience help?

Lots of the time, you may act as though you were our own worst enemy.

No matter what, you always feel as though people don’t like you.

You keep falling for the wrong person.

You always feel the need to fix. Or be fixed.

Expecting always too much from people and ending up disappointed. Expecting always too little, and ending up disappointed.

You know that wrath and anger are bad for you but when the situation presents itself you become convinced that anger is the only possible reaction.

You know that overthinking is making your life miserable, yet your mind stays relentless.

You want to chase your dream but end up going for the safe option over and over again.

You sabotage the good thing going even though you objectively know that you are every bit as worth it as anybody else in this wide world.

You always end up playing the same game with others. Which one are you the victim, the rescuer, the persecutor?

You understand that asking for help is OK. You even recommend it to others but you still somehow can’t do it yourself.

You know it is not good for you to eat that much, drink that much, [ ?] that much (insert your favourite sin), yet you continue doing it (and hating yourself for it).

It just never stops. Old habits die hard and the self-loathing is never too far.

Why this happens? 

Why are we so often and so obviously working against our best interests? 

It is one of biggest mysteries of human nature and one that the modern neuroscience science is only starting to shed a light on.

But let’s stay with the phenomenon and the feeling for the moment. 

If we see life and every little decision we make that leads us to where we are and also include all the other things and events in life, big and small that all converge into coalescing a certain state of mind, and certain familiar train of thoughts and feelings that arise or erupt as paths we take on a multidimensional graph converging towards always the same point - that old feeling, that old unhelpful action, that habitual behaviour we resent yet still perform.

In other words, no matter what the starting point, we end up in the same position - it is like a there is a local black hole in the space of experience, cognition and decision making - and it is as though its gravitational pull is virtually inexorable.

I call these irresistible pulls, like the ones I describe at the start, the strange attractors.

Strange Attractors

Now forgive me for intentionally introducing this psychotherapy and science faux-ami. I totally know I am doing it.

For a strange attractor is formally defined concept in the dynamic of complex systems - you might be familiar with it from physics or mathematics of complex systems and the chaos theory.

Heads up, you don’t need to know about physics and mathematics to follow the rest of the thread of this piece. I think the ideas are intuitive.

Essentially, while a stochastic (random) system might seem to operate at random, because of the underlying laws, some seemingly stochastic (random) systems tend to evolve towards a specific set of states, no matter what are the starting points. These states, to which the system converges, are called the strange attractors.

If I want to be more precise, the attribute strange is assigned to those attractors that do not have simple and regular forms but are rather irregular or fractal in nature - for example see one well known attractor called the Lorenz’s attractor below. But you can ignore this for out intents and purposes here.

I am both wildly incompetent and perfectly comfortable with making this makeshift and perfectly outrageous marriage between the theoretical physics and psychotherapy practice. The important thing is - I am using it as a METAPHOR. But an interesting one to use to think about the phenomenon at hand. Sometimes the use of the right metaphors can go a long way.

Why am I bringing the funky geometrical shapes into the conversation about the mental states and the habits of our mind (that we would rather not have)? I will try to give an answer now.

Is a Mental State A Point in Some Space?

One beauty of mathematics is its abstraction. What that means that it can model everything. Mental states included.

So think about how you are feeling just now. Include in that your feelings, things that you think about currently in your inner life, the kind of atmosphere that prevails internally. The ideas and facts from life that dominate in that inner landscape. The people that occupy it and what is the tone that they add into that mixture of an internal state. Include into this how much energy you feel you have, what is the overall state of your body. And anything else that seems relevant.

All of those things provide different coordinates in a multi-dimensional space (I don’t really know how many dimensions we should be talking, but certainly more than two or three) - and we find ourselves in one point of that space at any moment of time.

The assumption I am making here is that there is a link between that state configuration and the state configuration of the brain in that moment - at least in some ways.

In the end of the day, if we always end up feeling the same feeling, coming to the same conclusion, making similar behavioural decisions, it is because there is a aspect of the brain that wind up in the same state - feelings, decision making, thoughts are all a brain states, after all - or at least a portion of a state of the brain in a given moment of time. 

These states are not universal of course, although some element of it might be, but generally are relative to the specific context of each individual, with its idiosyncratic history, cultural context, initial wiring and genetics and probably some other factors I am forgetting here. All these elements are our priors. For our priors are serving as gauge against which all the decisions, positions and what we wind up feeling and doing are calibrated, on the light of new experiences.

And some priors or set of priors carry much more weight than others. 

1. For many people, the culture they grow up in is a strong prior. 
2. The relationship with the primary caregivers is likely a strong prior. 
3. Some other experiences - a strong emotional experience or a traumatic one is likely to shift the priors. Others yet might carry less weight but still count.

I write a little more about this stuff here.

To use geometry and the chaos theory to model brain states is of course not mine. I want to point here to one paper that gives an overview of how these brain states could be linked to mental states. There will be many others.

Remember, here, I am mostly using it as a metaphor.

Settling in the Local Minimum

The main idea to remember here is the following: 

That when it comes to some complex systems the following occurs: 

No matter what the starting point is, you end up in the same place. You end up in that strange attractor.

I use the strange attractor to as a metaphor for all those instances - so common (ubiquitous?) in therapy presentations - of mental states or behaviours that we so often seem to gravitate to, often times despite our better judgment (as illustrated in the beginning).

One way to represent this is using the idea of peaks and valleys on a graph (or indeed 3D graph as on the previous figure). Once in the vicinity of a valley the ball will roll into the bottom of the valley, regardless of its starting position.

When we think of those inexorable traits, behaviours and maladaptive decisions from the beginning - it is like no matter what we say to ourselves, what we rationally decide or how different this situation is from a previous one, we end up feeling the same way. We are like that little red ball.

From Metastability demystified — the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising future

This is still, at this point a metaphor, as I don’t know what is the space in which this landscape exists and what is the specific process by which our brain decides to go down the valley slopes into an already well known state.

I really want to emphasise the exploratory nature of this idea and a huge amounts of epistemic humility that I hold here, while still wanting to advance a hypothesis about different types of psychological stuckness.

Two really important questions immediately stand out for me:

1.Are these local minima attractor states glitches in the system, a design feature or the necessary trade-offs of system design (the most likely scenario IMHO)? In the end of the day, any biological system has finite resources when it comes to space, energy and other biological devices for implementation.

2. Can we hack it?

Yes, and the two points might be interconnected as the answer to the number 1 might help us think about how to do the number 2.

Escaping the Attractor: 

What Would Need to Happen?

Now, what this out of left field appropriation of concepts theoretical physics has to do with anything psychotherapy?

Obviously, in my mind it has EVERYTHING. Now, I don’t know how much it translates? 

Also, to fully give you an answer to that question you will have to give me a bit of time (in another essay).

To do this, I will likely have to venture into how brain makes decisions. 

Decisions tainted with emotion, decision that go against our better judgement. 

Decisions in different contexts. 

All in hope to get some ideas as to how to jolt the system, destabilise it, so it escapes its strange attractor.

Am I saying that the neuroscience has solved all the questions necessary to do that? 

No. But, I do think we are starting to know some things that can be used here especially when it comes to understanding how the brain assigns value in different social context, peer pressure and what our value system is.

So to recap:

Old habits of the mind die hard, and we end up going into same habitual states - similar feelings, behaviours, conclusions about life and others - even if those do not necessarily match the objective reality AND are not in our best interest

Being in the same affective, behavioural etc state is likely to be underpinned by a similar neural state

The brain is a complex system

Physics knows about laws of complex systems and why some of them converge to specific attractor states while they seem random

Ana Lund