Ecoclimber
Senior Member
- Messages
- 1,011
Maybe all that's needed is to stomp out that stupid butterfly! I hear MIT is working on something with their supercomputers.
Welcome to Phoenix Rising!
Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of, and finding treatments for, complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
To become a member, simply click the Register button at the top right.
Definitely. Its also why, in my opinion, many interventions have temporary effect. You push the system. You feel better. But its a stable system and pushes back. Medication "stops" working. Actually its still working, you have just moved to a slightly different stable state.
So back to the body. If we see this in a similar way as a non-linear system has it evolved so that processes move between stable states but based on certain parts of the system always working. If we were to change say the speed of response of increase a loss rate on signals within one of these loops could we get into a situation where the behaviour of a process becomes unpredictable and erratic or perhaps this situation would occur when there are other stimuli such as exertion.
First, an injury in the periphery (body) activates first order nociceptive (pain sensing) neurons to release the signaling cytokine CCL21, which then triggers secondary neuroinflammation in the thalamus, creating a ‘central generator of neuropathic pain’.
Neuroinflammation or neuroinflammatory tracks that spread through the nervous system alter neurotransmission and coding, causing higher order functional changes in the nervous system including, perhaps, deficits in higher level brain tasks such as executive functioning.
The way I am thinking is there are a number of dynamic processes involved with the basic management of the body (just don't ask me to list them). I'm assuming that they will get some control signals from the brain that help them adapt to the current state of the body. Generally they would be kept in an equilibrium by such action or pushed into an alternative equilrium which is suitable for managing a current change (for example during an infection the immune system will have various response loops). So that would be normal working which with feedback loops is likely to be non-linear in nature given a number of inputs.
So then if we follow something like some of the recent brain scanning work where if I remember correctly microglia were active in areas of the brain associated with controlling parts of the basic body functions. Then say a delayed incoming signal or a delayed or slightly wrong response could break the normal feedback loop which would maintain the system in a region where there is an equilibrium but push one or more parts of the body's management processes into a chaotic region and hence lead to a time or worsening symptoms etc but also perhaps a high degree of variation hence when measuring we may never get consistent measurements even within one person let alone across groups.
If we look at weather forecasting (which done through a complex series of non-linear equations with feedback) then we have stable weather states and unstable and unpredictable ones. What the forecasters do is they run their models with slight variations of the input parameters - often they get much the same predictions and hence can safely predict but sometimes they get a situation where the predictions are wildly different and they known they can not predict what will happen next. Although they still make a best guess since thats what people want - but they know it is highly uncertain.
So back to the body. If we see this in a similar way as a non-linear system has it evolved so that processes move between stable states but based on certain parts of the system always working. If we were to change say the speed of response of increase a loss rate on signals within one of these loops could we get into a situation where the behaviour of a process becomes unpredictable and erratic or perhaps this situation would occur when there are other stimuli such as exertion.
If the systems in the body that people are trying to measure are pushed into a chaotic space and hence unpredictable this could have a huge impact on the search for biomarkers as it may be that they change often and in unpredictable ways between people. Hence contradictory results from various groups.
It is one of the reasons I think it would be interesting to do a very detailed study on a few patients with very regular testing to sample what is happening over time. The other is generally if there is a dynamic system it may have time varying (or stimulus varying) behavior which is predictable but if we measure at a given point without knowledge of the variations then we can get a false picture. Like if we always look out of the window at the same time we wouldn't know that light varies over the course of day and night, This could be another reason for variations in measurements between research groups since there experiments may always measure a state at a given time or a given pre-exertion level but others have different times and exertion levels etc. Hence they all get a different view.
My feeling is that we don't have enough information about the way the body works to do any sort of dynamic modelling of systems to try to explore this from a mathematical angle. But I really don't have much knowledge or understanding of biological systems.