Changing: 1.9 Rhythms in Human Nature

1. RHYTHMS IN HUMAN NATURE

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Biophysicists call the rhythm-resetting moments, when they come, bifurcation points. They have been studied across an enormous range of physical, chemical, biological, social and even economic systems. Paul Davies describes them clearly: “At the bifurcation point,” he writes, “the inescapable fluctuations, which in ordinary equilibrium thermodynamics are automatically suppressed, instead become amplified to macroscopic proportions, and drive the system into its new phase which then becomes stabilized.”⁵

Hopi Life Plan Showing Bifurcated Pathway

We will encounter these fluctuations on all levels, from cells to civilizations. They work their way through human life in every venue. Possibly every biological rhythm by the time we get to see it is already perturbed, reset, become a compound rhythm, a carrier of near and distant echoes, timbres and modulations. You rarely encounter a timbreless tone in nature or a pure sine wave in music.