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The Security & Sustainability Guide

Statement of Purpose

The SSG is closely following the evolution of the global Covid-19 pandemic. We will identify important reports on understanding and coping with this dangerous virus, as well as plans for less-restricted post-Covid-19 futures. Our focus will be on economic and social impacts, especially concerning health security and the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Security and Sustainability Guide seeks to identify and briefly describe international organizations, and nation-oriented organizations of possible international interest, that are focused on the two basic human goals of Security and Sustainability–both broadly defined.

Security Organizations are concerned with human security, human rights, peacekeeping, conflict prevention, terrorism, nuclear issues, weapons, cyber-security, military organizations, etc. Sustainability Organizations focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustainable development, food security, water security, energy security, economic security, oceans, biodiversity, human population, green business and economics, etc.

There are thousands of guides to countries and cities, as well as flora and fauna. It is time for some guide to the rapidly growing number of security and sustainability organizations. But this is no easy matter, because human organizations are in flux, intertwined, and more difficult to classify.

Please excuse errors and inconsistencies; the S&S Guide is a continuing work-in-progress.

Access to these hundreds of organizations is provided here in several ways:

• A dashboard of 6 generic categories and 20 sub-categories on the Generic Categories Dashboard
• An alphabetized Major Categories Index of 60 categories with 5 or more listings.
• An alphabetized index of 600+ descriptors preceding the Part 4 Subject Index.
• An index to 100+ Information Portals for additional information on security or sustainability.
• An A-Z Title Index of 1,700+ organizations in Part 2.
• A KEYWORDS search box.

THREE IMPORTANT MESSAGES:

In addition to providing information on like-minded organizations and the wide range of organizations associated with security and sustainability, the S&S Guide has three key findings:

Remarkable Growth

The remarkable growth of Security and Sustainability organizations (see Chart) , with a median start-up date of 2002, is greatly under-appreciated by media and researchers; this is especially true for organizations supporting green business as a new type of capitalism.View Businesses»

Alliances, Coalitions & Networks

Formation of alliances, coalitions, consortia, and networks to overcome fragmented efforts is important; the Guide identifies nearly a hundred such groups, and more are probably desirable.View Networks »

Security + Sustainability

A small but growing group of organizations is linking both security and sustainability concerns realizing that we cannot have security without sustainability and vice versa.Why Security & Sustainability? »

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The Security & Sustainability Guide

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Entropy and life – Wikipedia

Entropy and life

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to search

Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and the evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910, American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of thermodynamics and on the principle of entropy.^[1][2]

The 1944 book What is Life? by Nobel-laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger stimulated further research in the field. In his book, Schrödinger originally stated that life feeds on negative entropy, or negentropy as it is sometimes called, but in a later edition corrected himself in response to complaints and stated that the true source is free energy. More recent work has restricted the discussion to Gibbs free energy because biological processes on Earth normally occur at a constant temperature and pressure, such as in the atmosphere or at the bottom of the ocean, but not across both over short periods of time for individual organisms.

Ideas about the relationship between entropy and living organisms have inspired hypotheses and speculations in many contexts, including psychology, information theory, the origin of life, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

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Entropy and life – Wikipedia

https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/

Humanitarian Innovation Needs Systems Thinking — Part 1

UNHCR Innovation ServiceFollowingAug 5 · 11 min read

Innovation to improve the work of protecting and serving refugees requires problem solving methods that uncover structural and human barriers, and tools for thinking through, testing and experimenting with possible solutions.

Innovation and organizations scholars Dave Francis and John Bessant (2005) have identified four types of innovation within an organization: changes to products and services, changes in the way those products and services are created and delivered, changes in how products and services are communicated, and changes in what the organization actually does.

To drive these innovations, innovators need to understand the systems they are working within, whether those are internal systems created by human resources or local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) crucial for delivering emergency aid. They need to understand the motivations of the various stakeholders, the norms and values shaping the organization’s culture, and policies and procedures that create formalized standards within the organization.

To identify the right problem to solve, innovators use systems thinking. Systems thinking is a methodology for identifying the root causes of complex problems and identifying interventions for systems change. This holistic approach to problem solving is critical for humanitarian innovation that works to create change within the sector by both introducing new ways of doing work or improving current practices (Warner, 2017).

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Humanitarian Innovation Needs Systems Thinking — Part 1 | by UNHCR Innovation Service | The Arc | Aug, 2020 | Medium

Part two:

When and How Do You Use Systems Thinking? — Part 2

UNHCR Innovation ServiceFollowingAug 14 · 9 min read

In his insightful article, Human-Centered, Systems-Minded Design, Thomas Both, Director of the Designing for Social Systems Program at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, tells the story of Jill Vialet (Both, 2018).

Vialet is the founder and CEO of PlayWorks, an organization that helps schools help their kids do their best by improving how they play during class breaks. School leaders often told Vialet they faced a shortage of substitute teachers. When a teacher called in sick, they did not have a reliable pool of substitute teachers to cover the classes. This created a challenge for the schools, as they would have to move teachers around or rush to find a replacement. As a result, teacher absences had adverse effects on the classroom and on the students’ learning outcomes.

Vialet wanted to take this challenge on. Most people working to solve this problem would assume the school simply needed to hire more substitute teachers. But as Both reports, when Vialet studied the substitute teacher system, she found that the problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough substitute teachers. In fact, there was a large pool of people already in the system, but few taught on a regular basis.

Vialet spent time with substitute teachers to identify the root cause of the problem and how to change the system. She found that, “Substitutes felt they weren’t respected or valued by schools, and felt they didn’t have a community of support in schools or among their fellow subs,” writes Both. Schools had to change how they interacted with and supported substitute teachers. This is quite a different intervention than simply recruiting more people. As a result of this work, Vialet founded Substantial Classrooms to help schools improve how they train and support substitute teachers.

Vialet was able to solve this complex problem because she employed both human-centered design and systems thinking. As Both writes,

“For both human- and systems-level challenges, we need to identify the problems worth addressing if we are to create meaningful change. Understanding the right problem, we can better create effective solutions. A very simple characterization of a design approach is that we move from working to understand a challenge, to working on creating solutions in response to the challenge.”

Systems thinking is a methodology for understanding complex problems. It helps us understand the motivations and beliefs of people involved, as well as structural dynamics at play. Knowing the dynamics of the systems we are trying to innovate will help us know where to act.

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When and How Do You Use Systems Thinking? — Part 2 | by UNHCR Innovation Service | The Arc | Aug, 2020 | Medium

Nonlinear Sciences > Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems

[Submitted on 16 Dec 2015 (v1), last revised 16 Sep 2016 (this version, v2)]

Dynamical criticality: overview and open questions

Andrea Roli, Marco Villani, Alessandro Filisetti, Roberto Serra

Systems that exhibit complex behaviours are often found in a particular dynamical condition, poised between order and disorder. This observation is at the core of the so-called criticality hypothesis, which states that systems in a dynamical regime between order and disorder attain the highest level of computational capabilities and achieve an optimal trade-off between robustness and flexibility. Recent results in cellular and evolutionary biology, neuroscience and computer science have revitalised the interest in the criticality hypothesis, emphasising its role as a viable candidate general law in adaptive complex systems. In this paper we provide an overview of the works on dynamical criticality that are -to the best of our knowledge- particularly relevant for the criticality hypothesis. We review the main contributions concerning dynamics and information processing at the edge of chaos, and we illustrate the main achievements in the study of critical dynamics in biological systems. Finally, we discuss open questions and propose an agenda for future work.

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[1512.05259] Dynamical criticality: overview and open questions

https://hbr.org/2019/12/can-you-know-too-much-about-your-organization

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Human Systems

Drag image to reposition📡Human SystemsHuman Systems is a network of people who care about designing better social systems. We run a club where social designers get feedback on their designs. We have trainings and a methodology for social designers. And you can talk to us about everything from ritual design to organizational process change to social app redesign (see below).Social SystemsHuman Systems is for designers of social systems: systems made of people, where there are codified and mutually understood roles and responsibilities. These designs can range from dinner table conversation games to social networks and global governance structures.Examples of Social Systems

The Social Design ClubEvery week we host an online event where someone presents a social design and gets feedback. Soon we’ll add presentations of successful and interesting social designs, and debates about what kind of social designs will best serve society.Last week Malcolm Ocean presented social features for a work tracking platform. This week, Ed Sapiera presents a next generation online video platform. You can RSVP for our next meeting at thestoa.ca.🌈The SDC is a collaboration between Human Systems, the Stoa, and Ḟreyjạ.Trainings and MethodologyWe also teach a method for designing social systems that focuses on human values, on the evolution of social norms in a system, and on the structural features which make it easier or harder for participants in a system to live and interact in the ways they value.•Learn to precisely articulate values—yours and those of others— and see when and how they are crowded out by other motivations and situational factors.•Redesign systems (workplaces, schools, family structures, social apps, etc) so as to support meaningful lives, interactions, and work. Use the HS Redesign Method.•Make rituals, games, group practices, organizational policies, institutions, or social technologies around values that are important to your community but lack space for full expression.•Join a vibrant and diverse network of meaning-first designers, and collaborate on your designs. Structural Features

Redesign Method

Imagine redesigning — News Feed, Family Dinners, Classroom Workgroups🌈We’ve been improving the Human Systems trainings for the last 3 years. Our school has trained 300+ well-positioned product people in our design methods and metrics. Our alumni have applied our methods at Facebook, Github and Apple; they’ve changed product direction at startups, and redesigned smaller systems like schools, co-living settlements, and families.🚀Learn more at 😎HS101 Deluxe.Talk to UsDepartment of Ritual Design•Hire help for a thorny ritual design task. Members of the Department of Ritual Design create customized rituals based on what is meaningful to the people involved. They start by articulating values in an interview. Then they design a custom ritual that supports participants in showing up in ways they find inspiring.👉Learn more at the 🌱Department of Ritual Design Design of Org Processes and Governance•Hire people to think about org change and flag values at risk. You can now hire HS-trained and certified teams to add to your organizational change process. These teams will assess the impact of potential features or redesigns on the values of users or workers. These “Values-at-Risk Assessments” will surface important values in the user or worker population that could be suppressed by an organizational change. The teams will present these potentially suppressed values, along with actionable steps that could be taken for each value at risk.👉Learn more at the 💼Design of Org Processes & Governance Dept Design of Social Apps and Environments•Hire people to join a design process and flag values at risk. You can now hire HS-trained and certified teams to add to your social app design process. These teams will assess the impact of potential features or redesigns on the values of users or workers. These “Values-at-Risk Assessments” will surface important values in the user or worker population that could be suppressed by a social design. The teams will present these potentially suppressed values, along with actionable steps that could be taken for each value at risk.👉Learn more at 🔗Design of Social Apps and Environments Dept Questions?🙋FAQ🙏Testimonials🚀Our MissionDepartments🌱Department of Ritual Design💼Design of Org Processes & Governance Dept🔗Design of Social Apps and Environments DeptPrograms👩🏻‍🎨Social Design Club😎HS101 Deluxe✍HS201: Redesigning Large Social Systems around Values📈HS202: Monitoring for Values and How They’re Working Out Miscellany🤓HS101 Self Study🎳Corona Games

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Human Systems

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Annual Conference – The OR Society

OR62 Online

STAYING CONNECTED

15 – 17 September 2020

REGISTER YOUR FREE PLACE HERE

OR62 Online: Annual Conference

Get ready to take your place at the profession’s flagship event – the Operational Research Society’s annual conference.

OR62 Online is shaping up to be the most engaging virtual gathering of OR and analytics thought leaders, advanced practitioners and rising talent.

This event, held online for the first time, is being developed to provide our dynamic profession with a wealth of opportunities to learn, collaborate and inspire.

Let’s stay connected, celebrate the achievements within our profession, and get ready for the future together. Free to attend with convenient access over the three days from your computer and smart device.

REGISTER HEREhttps://www.youtube.com/embed/DoEFLGeeXqs?autoplay=0&controls=1&showinfo=0&modestbranding=1&loop=0&fs=1&cc_load_policy=0&autohide=0&rel=0&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theorsociety.com&widgetid=1

View last years conference here

Meet the plenary speakers

The OR62 Online organisers are proud to announce the plenary speakers for OR62 Online. Each speaker is a leading thinker and innovator in their field. They will share their ground-breaking work with delegates in formal 60-minute presentations.

You can read more details about their talks and biographies by clicking read more.

READ MORE

Prof Dimitris Bertsimas
MIT

Talk Title: Interpretable AI

Ellen D. Lewis, PhD
Ethos of Engagement Consulting

Talk Title: Inclusive Systemic Evaluation: Deepening Understandings of Engagement and Community

Prof Patrick M. Reed
Cornell University

Talk Title: Conflict, Coordination & Control: Do We Understand the Actual Rules Used to Balance Flooding, Energy, and Agricultural Tradeoffs in River Basins?

sign up at source:

Annual Conference – The OR Society

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Technology-enabled deliberative democracy – RSA

TECHNOLOGY-ENABLED DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

11th August 2020

Written by:

Peter Miles FRSA

• Tagged with:
• DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY
• TECHNOLOGY

SAVE TO MY RSA

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We are seeing an increased recognition of the need for deliberative democracy. Peter Miles FRSA shares his experience of a technology-enabled structured dialogue methodology that actively supports a diverse group of stakeholders and experts to develop a deep and shared understanding of a complex challenge and then commit with confidence to a way forward.

While there are many group deliberation methods around, most rely on simple technology (such as the humble but ubiquitous post-it note), or apply computing in a passive mode as a way of documenting and sharing text. Almost always there is a tacit assumption that words and sentences have a single meaning.

The structured dialogue methodology introduced here has its roots in Interactive Management, developed in the 1970s by John Warfield and Alexander Christakis in the US. This approach spread around the world under a variety of names, including Structured Dialogic Design, Structured Democratic Dialog and Demosophia. It is designed to avoid ‘cognitive overload’ and reduce distortion due to power imbalances, to integrate diverse expertise and perspectives, and it enables deep mutual understanding as a solid foundation for progress. While the technology plays an active part and the process of facilitation plays an important role, the content is always owned by the participants.

Let us start with an outline of the experience of the participant. First of all, they will be in the room – known as a Colab – for a reason; the participation group will have been carefully designed at an earlier stage of the process, taking account of the overall context, and aiming above all for cognitive diversity. They may be deeply involved in the particular issue and care about any potential changes, as a stakeholder; or they may have sway over resources that will be needed for implementation. They could be an expert of some sort – possibly technical, or financial, or from working in a frontline position – that gives them a specific insight into how things really work.

Participants will be asked to answer a ‘trigger question’, initially working on their own. The question will be a broad one, designed to cover the scope of the situation, and along the lines of: ‘What are the main issues, barriers and challenges we face in achieving X?’ Everyone will then be asked to provide just one answer. That answer will be captured in a software tool, along with answers from everyone else and this process continues until a number of answers are captured. Then participants get the opportunity to clarify the answers that others have given and these clarifications are again recorded and captured, always using their own words. Further understanding emerges during a grouping phase, where answers are contrasted and compared.

The next stage is where the magic happens.

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Technology-enabled deliberative democracy – RSA

Other links from Pete:

A brief history of interactive management and structured dialogue: https://demosophia.com/a-brief-history-of-interactive-management-and-structured-dialogue/

paper: https://t.co/phKVC8OChA?amp=1

http://futureworlds.eu/wiki/Reinventing_Democracy

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Oswald Wiener: “Science and barbarism go very well together“ | Spike Art Magazine

OSWALD WIENER: “SCIENCE AND BARBARISM GO VERY WELL TOGETHER“

Interviewby Hans-Christian Dany

When the Vienna Actionists urinated, masturbated, and vomited at an event titled “Art and Revolution” in Vienna University’s Lecture Hall 1 in 1968, the proceedings were accompanied by a lecture on the relationship between speech and thought by the then thirty-two-year-old Oswald Wiener. One year later his literary montage die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (the improvement of central europe, a novel) was published. With its excurses on linguistics and cybernetics, it now reads as an astonishing foreshadowing of the Internet and virtual reality. Later, Wiener turned to the figure of the dandy, who maintains his difference from machines by cultivating a practice of self-observation. Hans-Christian Dany visited him at his home in southeast Austria to talk about the peculiar standstill of art and science in the digital age.

The moment I get into the hire car, I know they’ve given me the right vehicle for my mission. A small screen shows what I could drive into should I choose to reverse. I hesitate briefly but resist the temptation. On the way there I don’t see anything but the road. The world has disappeared into fog, but a voice is guiding me. My destination is somewhere just before the border to Slovenia and Hungary. On a mountain there lives a who professes to have been cultivating idiocy for fifty years. Where I come from, he enjoys an almost magical reputation. When I told my friends I was going to meet him, they looked at me in disbelief. “I didn’t think he really existed”. And indeed, it isn’t easy to imagine the life of a person who described, fifty years before the fact, the peculiar irreality that would come to pass through the Internet. A person who seems to rise above the current of time, one whose life story reads like a novel. A person who today hopes that our attention might again shift to the self-observation of human thought as a form of artistic research.

“You have reached your destination”. I park the Nissan in front of an inconspicuous house. The name Wiener really does appear on the door. Ingrid Wiener, easily recognisable by the melody of her speech, opens it. Further back, in the darkness of the kitchen, I make out Oswald Wiener. The seventy-nine-year-old seems real enough, and bears no resemblance to a fictional character who can travel in time inside his own head. One wonders whether it was just such an interconnection of real and linguistic existence that enabled him to write one of the most shattering novels of the twentieth century. Or whether it was this way of thinking that enabled him to use the historical figure of the dandy to cast light on the problems of the artificial intelligences of the future. For this was the kinetic logic of a writer who it was impossible to pin down, who would disappear behind pseudonyms or among gold prospectors at the furthest ends of the world, only to return with recordings of the songs of wild Canadian dogs. This was the author of a work that for a long time appeared to be hopelessly fragmented, but which today has constituted itself as a compelling intellectual achievement. A blinding sun is shining through the window. I unwrap my recording device from a white silk cloth. The man opposite me picks up exactly the same device, and sets it up next to the first one like a reflection. At one and the same time, both of us say: a good machine.

You initially wanted to be a jazz musician, but then you switched from playing the trumpet to working for Olivetti.

Jazz was implanted in me at the age of twelve. There was a radio station run by the American Occupation, the Blue Danube Network, which was a kind of request programme for the soldiers. It was on seven days a week, and once a week it played a piece of jazz. This was in 1947/48. I was living in a reform school at the time, and all the boys had a germanium diode crystal receiver with a piece of wire that you could bend and adjust until you got the right frequency. For headphones we used earpieces stolen from phone box telephones. And with them we’d listen to the radio under the covers every evening.
Then, in the 1950s, my childhood friend Konrad Bayer inducted me into the circle of artists and poets. My interest in poetry grew with my realisation that my musical talent was not going to turn me into a world-famous jazz trumpeter. I liked the poems of Gerhard Rühm or H.C. Artmann as much as I liked music. Then I got sick of all that as well, I saw that my poetry was a kind of imitation of Rühm’s – at best, an imitation with different intentions to his own. That was the end of my foray into art, and now I wanted to do the exact opposite: marry, have children, take up a bourgeois profession. I very quickly had a successful career at Olivetti; they were waiting for a guy like me. That’s where I learned the principles of programming.

Was this applied programming, or was it linked to the debate over cybernetics that was going on at the time?

The term cybernetics had only just reached Central Europe. People didn’t exactly know what it meant. In 1959 I stole the first copy of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics from the lending library of the Vienna Information Center, a propaganda institute run by the American occupation forces. At the time I didn’t entirely understand it. I still don’t know whether I entirely understand it today.

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Oswald Wiener: “Science and barbarism go very well together“ | Spike Art Magazine

ORIGINAL ARTICLE Automatic for the People? Cybernetics and Left‐Accelerationism Michael E. Gardiner First published: 06 August 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12528

Automatic for the People? Cybernetics and Left‐Accelerationism – Gardiner – – Constellations – Wiley Online Library

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiqqun

Ecosystem resilience to drought and flooding One of the three projects that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund is aimed at the question how the robustness of plant ecosystems to drought and flooding depends on the plasticity of individual plants and heterogeneity of the plant population. The research proposal was written by Prof. Kirsten ten Tusscher, Prof. Stefan Dekker and Dr. Hugo de Boer.Read more      »

Leveraging a food transition for Arctic indigenous communities  Indigenous Arctic communities are experiencing a fundamental, undesired and unsustainable shift in their food system. Science-based visions of sustainable solutions are lacking, and the capacity within communities to evoke change is low. Dr. Ine Dorresteijn and Prof. Bert Theunissen received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund for their project aimed at leveraging a food transition for indigenous communities in the Bering Sea.Read more      »

Stability of underdetermined dynamical systems  Another project that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund focuses at the role of networks in the dynamics of random dynamical systems. The research proposal was written by Dr. Ivan Kryven, Dr. Mara Baudena and Dr. Anna von der Heydt, who address their research question on the level of mathematical foundations, as well as by studying several real-world examples where networks are anticipated to play a crucial role in systems dynamics.Read more      »

http://faculteitbetawetenschap.m12.mailplus.nl/txt31558376/UhVYgfmevZit3WE

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Pluralism and Systems Thinking: | Harish’s Notebook – My notes… Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

Pluralism and Systems Thinking:

In today’s post, I am looking at the idea of pluralism, something that is important to hold in Systems Thinking. I am relying on the ideas of the British philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin. Berlin is most famous for his ideas on freedom. He coined the terms negative and positive freedom. Loosely put, negative freedom is the freedom from constraints or interference from others. And positive freedom is the freedom to act upon one’s own desires and ambitions.

My favorite lesson from Berlin is pluralism – his take on anti-monism. Monism is the idea that there is only one true answer to questions

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Pluralism and Systems Thinking: | Harish’s Notebook – My notes… Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

Hmmm… this seems mostly like a nice summary of progress and revision in science – and, of course, we might all be able to read confirmation of our biases into ‘the brain is a network’.

And yet, and yet… ‘brain science’ seems weirdly subject to the problems of all science – trends and fashions, prevailing orthodoxies, reification of models, confirmation or theory bias, all kinds of holding strongly what might better be held lightly. And of course we need people to hold their models strongly, against orthodoxies and trends, to make breakthroughs in understanding… but when I see either/or thinking, I get worried – and especially when I see quotes like: “The brain literally is a network… It’s not a metaphor.” However, the article ends with:

For Sporns, the marriage is a natural one. “Networks are not so much an antidote to localizationism,” he says. “They’re more like a way of combining a framework where you look for local differences with one where you look at the system as a whole.” Perhaps, then, even as network neuroscience becomes increasingly popular, Broca’s legacy will live on.

A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring | WIRED

But I’m certainly no expert in this space, so here it is:

GRACE HUCKINSSCIENCE08.17.2020 07:00 AM

A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring

Network neuroscience could revolutionize how we understand the brain—and  change our approach to neurological and psychiatric disorders.

IN MID-19TH CENTURY Europe, a debate was raging among early brain scientists. Strangely, this academic disagreement had its roots in the pseudoscience of phrenology, the practice of measuring bumps on the skull to determine someone’s personality. Phrenology had found purchase at fairs and was quite popular with the general public, but it had been roundly rejected by most scholars. For others, though, this carnival trick held a pearl of inspiration. Phrenology depended on the assumption that different parts of the brain are associated with different traits and abilities, a position called “localizationism.” And the absurdity of skull-measuring did not necessarily invalidate this notion.

But others disliked the stench of charlatanism that clung to any ideas associated with phrenology. This second camp contended that capacities are evenly distributed throughout the brain, and so damage to any one brain region would have the same effect as damage to any other. The debate between these groups raged until 1861, when Paul Broca, a French neurologist, reported on a patient with a bizarre set of symptoms. Though this man could not speak, he was entirely capable of understanding language, and his intelligence seemed unaffected. When the patient died and Broca dissected his brain, he discovered a lesion, or site of severe damage, low on the left side of his brain. Here was an individual who had sustained brain damage in a specific area and had lost a very specific ability—while the rest of his functions remained intact! Localizationism had been vindicated. For the next 150 years, it would be the dominant position in brain science.

Operating under the assumption that different parts of the brain have separate functions, neuroscientists have made remarkable progress toward understanding how the brain works. They have discovered that vision happens at the back of the head, that a tiara of tissue at the top of the brain sends commands to the muscles so that the body can move, and that a small structure beneath the ear has the specific responsibility of recognizing faces. All of these regions are made of gray matter, a type of tissue that contains neuron cell bodies and covers the surface of the brain. Underneath lies the white matter, which stretches in bundles of fiber between regions of gray matter and carries messages all over the brain. But though figuring out the function of a particular piece of gray matter can be straightforward enough—look for someone with damage to that area and see what they are unable to do—white matter has proven more difficult to pin down. “For a long time, we’ve been ignoring that connectivity because we didn’t know how to talk about it,” says Danielle Bassett, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

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A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring | WIRED