Santa Fe Institute Collaboration Platform

COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

Get Involved!
Contact: Caitlin Lorraine McShea, Program Manager, cmcshea@santafe.edu

Cognitive Regime Shift I - When the Brain Breaks/DavidKrakauer

From Complex Time

Notes by user David Krakauer (SFI) for Cognitive Regime Shift I - When the Brain Breaks

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

  • Presentation highlights
  • Open questions that came up
  • How your perspective changed
  • Impact on your own work
  • e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

A number of critical questions were raised about the best levels at which to establish causality when it comes to understanding both natural and disease-related aging. Namely what are the best observables to consider? Should these be single measurements or network based measurements. Could the best indicators involve comparisons across genetic and cognitive networks applying similar methods, or as is more typical time-dependent changes in a given network at one level of analysis. A recurring question was the relationship between energy and information and how their reciprocal dependencies change over the course of time and the course of disease.

Some very general issues that arose in conversation that require further exploration include:

  1. Approaching disease from a first-principles theoretical perspective - as is common in ecology - thus establishing principled data collection objectives (this would require a rigorous operational definition of the disease state in formal terms)
  2. The value and limitation of the current inductive, big data approach, that focuses on time-dependent associations
  3. The meaning of cognitive reserve, exercise or error correction, and the limits to these
  4. How adaptive phenomena that are ongoing mitigate the disease state or at some point perhaps accelerate it.
  5. How we might better explore causality in large systems with extensive non-linear feedback mechanisms.

Reference material notes

Some examples:

  • Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
  • Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
  • This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
  • Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).

Reference Materials

Presenter on the following Agenda items

"Prion dynamics and latency"

Presentation file
Related files

Upload a related file