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In Praise of Failure and Fractals in Physiology
Author(s) -
West Bruce J
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.2019.33.1_supplement.532.8
Subject(s) - praise , natural (archaeology) , catastrophic failure , undoing , process (computing) , term (time) , computer science , statistical physics , econometrics , mathematics , psychology , history , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , psychotherapist , operating system , thermodynamics
Pushing the natural variability from the central region of a probability distribution describing a process, out into the tails of the probability, has two effects: 1) the natural low‐level variability disappears from the policymakers field of vision, making everything appear calm and trouble free; 2) when a suppressed fluctuation does appear it is completely unexpected and devastating. Strategies that artificially suppress all variability to achieve short‐term stability of a complex environment, do just the opposite. Such deceptively calm environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off‐guard and undoing years of stability, often ending up in a far worse situation than their initial volatile state. An alternate strategy would be to take advantage of natural variability, by judiciously applying the innovator's mantra “fail small, fail often”. In this way local failures are induced in complex processes by natural variability, as is always the case. Failures are kept small through timely human intervention and catastrophic failure is thereby avoided. We examine the hypothesis that the control of physiological time series results from allowing the underlying process to fail in small ways, and on a fairly regular basis. The notion of suppressing the natural variability of such time series is shown to increase the likelihood of failure being catastrophic when it does occur. Herein we use the fractional probability calculus to frame our arguments and to parameterize the control process that tempers the Lévy process through a criticality‐induced potential. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .