Emergent Behavior

 "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." - Vincent Van Gogh

My passion is to enlighten people to the concept of extraordinary lives. And by extraordinary I do not mean super-human. I mean the making of a real effort to be just a little better than average, to want fulfillment, to live just north of the ordinary meridian. The extraordinary life is one marked by minor elevations of our personal growth habits that lift us above mundane. By living this way we can have an impact on the lives we touch. By doing so we can uplift entire societies. How? Through the phenomenon of emergent behavior.

Dr. Debbie Berebichez, a Stanford graduate born in Mexico City who seeks to inspire young people, particularly girls, to study the sciences, defines emergent behavior as occurring, "when a system composed of independent parts forms more complex behaviors as a collective." It is not just aggregate behavior, like sand becoming a beach, but that which is different from the sum of its parts. We've all seen beehives in operation. Bees wouldn't last long as solitary creatures. However, when enough bees get together they develop a hierarchy and a work process. The behavior that emerges best serves the needs of the hive. Together, their individual bee attributes become the collective behavior we recognize as bee essence.

I believe we can adopt the concept of emergent behavior for personal development. I believe if we take our core behavior pattern; the one we unconsciously manifest daily, the one which is the central aspect of our personality that others define us by, and view it as a cooperative of patterns that can each be improved upon, then collectively, what will emerge from the incremental improvements will be a person that is remarkably different from the individual who began a quest for personal growth. The resultant personality will inspire emulation among friends and family and extend to neighborhoods and beyond. So real development actually arises from making small changes across the spectrum of daily behaviors, such as what we take an interest in, which television shows we watch, the amount of time we spend watching television, the books we read with our children, the effort to exercise, the discussions we have with our friends, the challenges we present to ourselves and the amount of celebrity gossip and over-indulgence we begin to refuse in our lives.

Dr. Berebichez, a theoretical physicist, uses the perception of popularity as an example of emergent behavior. I think she is referring to a kind of group-think that develops to both ignite popularity and attract us to it. It's an interesting take. In humans, the fear of loss is stronger than the desire to gain. For some people, participating in an activity they wouldn't normally be part of, but do so merely because of its popularity, demonstrates this idea of not wanting to 'miss out' on what everyone else is doing. For example, without reality TV, most thinking humans wouldn't care about the inane lives of certain New Jersey housewives, but the popularity fosters interest, which engenders a collective behavior that is detrimental to society. Am I being melodramatic? No. Time is finite. For every minute we spend watching this dribble we steal from our future a minute we could be spending in search of the extraordinary. When one person watches this kind of television, they promote that activity to their children, who then develop the same unproductive habits which they pass on to their offspring. Soon, what emerges is a society that is falling behind the rest of the world in math, literature and the sciences. On the positive side, extraordinary people conduct themselves in a way that is inspiring, challenging, rewarding and fulfilling.

We must begin this process with a realistic assessment of the individual behavior patterns that make up our collective self. This is not easy to do given our inability to be honest with ourselves. But try we must; as Frank Gehry says, "to bumble forth into the unknown."

So take action. Don't just accept things as they are. Be the driving force behind your life. Blaming our circumstances is an easy couch to flop on, and couches make your butt fat.

What does this have to do with our central theme, which is architecture? We will find out in the next post. What I'm striving for here is to demonstrate a behavior that I think is important for exploring creativity, which is to apply a cross-discipline philosophy, such as asking how architects can inspire personal development, or how, as asked by Dr. Berebichez, does science play a role in our everyday lives. To find out, please visit her web site, www.thesciencebabe.com.

Next post: Can architecture stimulate emergent behavior? Stay connected...