Too regular is also unhealthy. Health is a state of orderly and disorderly
Author:Look at the think tank Time:2022.09.26
Hello everyone, I am Cui Xingran, from the School of Biology and Medical Engineering, Southeast University.
I don't know if you usually observe how the fish swim in the water. Linear geometry tells us that if a group of fish wants to swim from one position to another, then the straight line between two points is the shortest. The best solution should be to swim directly linearly, but in fact Not linear swimming.
Source: a. Filella et al., PHYS. Rev. Lett. (2018)
This is an article published in PHYSICAL Review Letters in 2018. It physical modeling explains that when the fish group tip in the ocean, it will form a non -linear interaction with the surrounding water, forming such a very beautiful pair of beautiful pairs Dynamic picture.
So what is non -linear? I use a very simple folk proverb to explain it. This proverb says this, "One monk picks water, two monks lift water, and three monks have no water to drink."
We assume that each monk picks two barrels of water a day, so the three monks should have 6 barrels of water a day, that is, 2+2+2 = 6. However, the three monks will have quarrels after they are together. Each monk feels that he can drink water without picking water, so the three monks in the proverb have no water to drink.
The process of this quarrel is actually a non -linear interaction. At this time, the simple linear superposition relationship does not exist, and the result becomes 2+2+2 = 0, which means If you can't see this result, only the three monks are put together as a whole, can we produce such a new result. We are called emergence.
Based on this fact, such a system constitutes a non -linear complex system, and we must look at this system as a whole.
Text 丨 Associate Professor of Cui Xingran Southeast University School of Biology and Medical Engineering
This article is reproduced from the WeChat public account "one seat" (ID: yixiclub). The original first was released on September 22, 2022. The original title was "Too regular and unhealthy. ｜ Cui Xingran's 930th speaker "does not mean looking at the view of the think tank.
1
Great physicist Hawking once said that the 21st century will be a complex scientific century. Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was also awarded a complex system to reward it to make a pioneering contribution to human understanding of complex physical systems, indicating that the Nobel Prize Award The committee has realized that the research in complex science is of great significance to solve the major problems of our human society.
When I heard this news, I was very excited, because the research made by our team was based on complex system theory, and the scientist Parisi on the right just knew my teacher.
The complex system is so important, but many people are more unfamiliar with the concept of complex systems. In fact, there are complex systems everywhere in the universe, such as the earth's climate system. It is composed of atmospheric rings, water rings, ice and snow rings, and rock rings and biospheres. It is a very complicated system.
Another example is human financial market, it is also a complex system. It is not only affected by financial capital, but also affected by various other factors, such as national policies, international political patterns, new crown pneumonia epidemic, and even the earth climate system that will affect it.
If we want to quantify, we say that 99.9%of the system in the universe space is a complex system, and the remaining 0.1%is simplified by the complex system. The complex system is everywhere, constitutes the cells, brains, including the entire life system, which are complex systems after another.
So taking biological systems as an example, it actually has some rules. This law is related to the ability of the biological system to adapt to the environment. Let me give me two examples. The first is in the 1820s. Swedish physicist Max Kleiber measured the metabolic rate of a series of animals and found that the metabolic rate was directly related to the size of the animal body.
Horizontal coordinates: the quality of animal body, vertical coordinates: metabolic rate
From the simplest single -cell animals, to cold -blooded animals such as flies, frogs, and turtles, until mammals around us, such as mice, cheetahs, elephants, etc. Their rules can be represented in a very simple formula, and later called Kleiber's Law:
(Y: metabolic rate; m: weight; b is constant, B = 3/4)
Another interesting law is that scientists have discovered that the number of mammal animals' lifetime centers is about 9 times, which is 1 billion times. There are two pictures in it. The horizontal coordinates of these two pictures are the number of mammals from birth to natural death.
The vertical coordinates on the left are the weight of mammals, and on the right is its life length. We can see that the number of times of the lifelong center of mammals is neither affected by weight, nor is it affected by the length of life, and it is really about 1 billion times.
Human beings are also in it, and human weight is the longest. These facts tell us that the complex life system is regular. So what kind of system is a healthy system? We take the autonomous nervous system of the human body as an example. What is autonomy? It is not controlled by personal will. It contains a lot of ingredients, involving various internal organs, for example, in our brain, the spine, and the internal organs of the whole body.
Among them, the most important one is the sympathetic nervous system, and the other is the sub -sympathetic nervous system. Under the control of these two systems, our body can have various life activities.
The sympathetic nerves will play a dominant role when our body is nervous and excited, such as me who is talking at the moment. When the sympathetic nervous system is excited, we will increase blood pressure and speed up our heartbeat.
Speaking of which, some friends here will think that you said that the total number of centers in your life is about 1 billion times, and friends with a faster heartbeat may be a little nervous. Don't worry, when we have the nervousness of our vice sex, the heartbeat will slowly drop and the blood pressure will decrease. In other words, in the process of healthy life activities, the dominance of the sympathetic and parane nerves should be in a dynamic balance.
The function of the human nervous system is actually a result of biological evolution. When will our ancestors start the sympathetic nerves? Basically, in the process of hunting, when encountering a lion and a tiger to catch up, at this time, you need to quickly decide whether to fight it or run away.
With the development of today's society, the probability of we facing this acute stress has greatly reduced. After all, we have a very small chance of encountering lions and tigers on the road. When humans are in chronic pressure or anxiety, the sympathetic nerves will dominate and break the balance of autonomic nerves.
If the body is in this imbalance for a long time, it is easy to cause disease and threaten our health.
Our team's over the past few decades has found that healthy complex biological systems should be in dynamic balance. If they deviate from this balance, it will cause the system's state and function to be damaged and even collapsed.
We can use a relatively simple physical model to indicate that we can see that when dynamic balance is the healthiest, but when you deviate from this dynamic balance, no matter which side you are, we are in an unhealthy state.
This inverted U -shaped structure is actually very common in our daily life. As early as 1908, two psychologists Yerkes and Dodson, they summarized a rule through experiments to explain the relationship between our psychological pressure, work difficulty and work performance.
Yerkes-Dodson's law or pour U model
They found that the relationship between psychological pressure and work performance is not linear, but this inverted U -shaped curve. In other words, when we are in a moderate pressure, we can get the best work performance.
This phenomenon is very common. It can be said that each of us is in it. For example, as a university teacher, I have a lot of such places that need to be balanced: I want At the same time, as a mother, I also have to balance my family and career.
So how do we find these balance points? I think we can better understand the various complex systems of our human body with some modern scientific methods.
The more complicated the system, the more complicated the non -linear interaction between the elements of the system. At this time, the structure of each element in the system in the past is not enough to understand the function and state of the system. Think about this problem with the idea of overall theory.
2
If we use the human body as an overall system, we are all accepted the stimulus of the external environment all the time. At this time, the system will have some output signals. We can respond every time. Functional state.
So what signals can the physiological system of the human body output? Actually a lot.
For example, the brain electrical signal obtained from the brain, the ECG signal obtained from the heart, and the pulse wave signal measured at the wrist area, as well as the real -time heart rate signal that can be extracted from ECG and pulse waves, or even the acceleration of walking by walking Signals are also a manifestation of physical function and state.
Taking the real -time heart rate signal that everyone is familiar with, there are four real -time heart rate signals in the picture. In order to show fairness, their average heart rate in these 30 minutes is 60 times in 1 minute. Among them, three people are unhealthy and only one is healthy. You can guess which one is.
I think many people may have answers, let's announce it. Is there a candidate A?
A is a serious heart failure. What kind of people will appear a heart rate of A? It is a person with a pacemaker. You can see that this heart rate is kept 60 times a minute, and it has not moved.
Some people say that A does not move, then it should be healthy, so some people choose C.
C is also a severe heart rate failure, which is ischemic heart rate failure. A and C are wrong, some candidates have chosen D.
D is also unhealthy, it is atrial fibrillation, that is, atrial fibrillation. When the atrium trembling, the heart rate is not controlled by the nervous system.
I don't know if there is any person B?
B is healthy, congratulations.
So the heart rate in the A and C figures is too regular and unhealthy. The overly disorderly heart rate like D is also unhealthy, and health is a state of orderly and disorderly.
In fact, I also asked my daughter two days ago. She was just 5 years old. She said it was B at a glance. I was surprised. Because we generally ask many academic occasions, let everyone guess that the accuracy rate will not exceed 20%. I asked her why B? She answered me, because B is the best. What a simple answer?
We say that the human body must adapt to the environment, and it will have some dynamic changes, but the human body's ability to maintain dynamic balance is not inherent, nor will it continue.
When we are very young, the function of the body is often very strong, and the perception of the outside world is also very sensitive. At this time, we can respond quickly in the face of information input in the outside world.
However, as we get older, first of all, our perception of the outside world will slowly weaken, not only to perceive the weakness, but the output of the future is weaker, so we will become more and more monotonous.
For example, like some older people, the peripheral nerves of the soles will become particularly not sensitive, so when he walks, the perception of the surrounding environment will also weaken, and the gait walking will be very unstable.
Our large number of studies have confirmed that the ability of human physiological systems to maintain dynamic balance will decrease with age.
The horizontal coordinates in the figure below are the age of the person, and the vertical coordinates are the ability to maintain dynamic balance in the human body. Every point represents a real person, they are very healthy people, without any disease.
We can see that the human body's ability to maintain dynamic balance will decline sharply at the age of sixty or seventy.
So many examples have told us that the seemingly disorderly complex system actually contains some simple and simple laws. The output of various physiological signals in the human body is actually a health report passed out of the body.
At this time we can use some devices, such as wearable devices to monitor these signals, and help people prevent some diseases through some algorithms and technologies.
We know that medical resources in remote mountain areas in China are obviously insufficient. It can be imagined that if there are some equipment that is simple and practical and do not need a professional doctor to operate, it can be used by ordinary people after training to diagnose preliminary disease diagnosis for people in the village. Isn't that good? Intersection
Driven by this concept, my teacher, Professor Peng Zhongkang of Harvard Medical School, led our team to develop such a set of equipment. Basic life signs.
It can detect 13 diseases, such as urinary tract infections, anemia, type II diabetes, including atrial fibrillation, heart rate failure, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, hypertension, etc. If you have skin diseases, you can also put it in your ears to see if there are otitis media.
Sleep monitoring is also a feature in this device. We just said that the sympathetic and parane nerves need to maintain dynamic balance, and there are many ways to maintain balance, such as exercise, such as sleeping. Healthy sleep is a good way to promote the sub -sympathetic nervous system to return to the balance state, so everyone should pay more attention to rest.
What do you traditional to monitor sleep? If you walk into the hospital's sleep monitoring room, you will be tied up by a large flower, and then you can wear more than 20 lines, and you have to try to sleep in the hospital. In short, it is very inconvenient.
In order to allow this device to be used at home, we have developed a set of algorithms based on cardiopulmonary coupling technology, which means that you only need a device to measure your real -time heart rate, such as a very small electrical address, or or or. Wearing a bracelet, we can judge whether we are sober, sleeping or sleeping, or even dreaming.
Some people say that I do n’t want to detect sleep, then you can wear it 24 hours a day, so that you can also detect the dynamic changes of your sympathetic and sub -sympathetic nervous system.
3
With the development of modern society, people not only care about their physiological health, but also put forward higher needs for mental and mental health. Then this requires us to obtain the state of the brain by measuring the brain's brain signal.
When traditional measuring brain electrical signals, the measured person needs to wear a brain cap, which is very complicated and requires professionals to operate.
Similarly, in order to solve this problem, we have also developed wearable electrical devices like in the figure below. You just need to wear it, and it doesn't matter if you can walk around everywhere, it is very convenient.
Sensors 2022, 22 (5)
What can it do? For example, the attention of children with dynamic disease, evaluation of depression, identification of emotional problems, etc. So, can it really prevent mental illness through these? Let's look at the following example.
There is a bipolar disorder and a healthy person in this experiment. What is bipolar disorder? It is manic and depression, also known as bipolar emotional disorders. Such patients have a lot of patients in their lives.
The researchers gave them a meter watch, and let them record what they felt today. From 1 point to 10 points, recording two years in a row. Then you can see that the emotions of bipolar disorder are very high, otherwise it is very low, and there are very few when they are in the middle. Source: Gottschalk a et al. Arch Gen Psychiatry (1995)
But healthy people are different. He may be in 2.3 points today, and tomorrow is 7.8 points. He will feel that 1 to 10 is not enough. It is more detailed. You can see that the dynamic changes in emotions have many rules. And it is not as monotonous as the mood score of bipolar disorder.
Psychiatric doctors have summarized for many years and found that patients with various mental illness, whether they are their personality, behavior or cognitive emotions, generally develop towards two extremes.
One is particularly orderly, such as obsessive -compulsive disorder, indifference, delusional disease, etc., which makes the other is particularly messy, such as impulsive personality disorder, mania fiction, and so on.
Source: yang AC, TSAI sj. Prog neuropsychopharmacol biol psychiatry (2012)
So we find that both physiological or spiritual, our system needs to maintain a dynamic balance.
Can this dynamic balance be quantified? Can we quantify "health"? In other words, can I get a value to describe how far is the balance now and what is the state? My teacher, Professor Peng Zhongkang, proposed an algorithm early. We also published this algorithm on the top issue of Physical Review Letters in the physics world.
If you still remember those ECG just now, the patients with heart failure are especially in order. What do we do when we want to quantify their status?
If I look at the heart rate of healthy people from different time scale, it is not difficult to see that its heart rate is different at each scale. But for patients with excessive heart rate and disorder, we can see that no matter how the scale changes, its heart rate seems to be similar.
So this quantitative "healthy" algorithm is that we look at the chaos of this time sequence from different time scale. Among them, the horizontal coordinates are the time scale, and the vertical coordinate is the sample entropy, which represents the chaos of the time sequence.
Source: PHYS Rev Lett 2002; 89: 068102
Let's look at the particularly disorderly real -time heart rate (AF). When I look at the most original time scale, it is very chaotic, but when I slowly increased with the time scale, it will slowly fall Come down.
For the real -time heart rate (CHF) with a special regularity, no matter which time scale is used, it is very low from beginning to end.
The green line represents a healthy person. It can be seen that it is particularly stable, and it maintains the ability to maintain dynamic balance at different time scale.
When we applied this algorithm to the Electronics, we discovered a very interesting phenomenon -the complexity of the ease and electrical complication of patients with depression is unbalanced.
The black line in the figure is the result of our analysis of the brain electrical signals of healthy people. The red line represents the analysis results of depression patients.
If this red dotted line is separated, you will find that the dynamic complexity curve of depression patients is chaotic at a small scale, and its confusion is decreasing when the right is large. The entire curve shows a state of tilting and imbalances.
Now use the curve to analyze it. If we continue to quantify it and use the value to indicate,
We will see that the value of a healthy person will fall on the diagonal, but the value of patients with depression will move down, and the entire deviations deviate from balance.
We used a lot of data to verify this conclusion, including the depression databases of Malaysia, the United States, and China, all found the same trend, and the more depression, the more serious the degree of deviation and imbalance.
What is the use of these? In other words, if we can find that this person deviates from balance earlier, we can give him some intervention treatment. For example, when the development of depression is not particularly serious, use some non -drug methods to control it. A very common method such as sports, such as meditation, and even music therapy can have a good effect.
Many scientific research has found that music can promote the restoration of the brain status. There are three main theoretical mechanisms: one is that music can promote nerve activation and reshape, the second is the network that can activate rewards and emotions, and music can activate music to activate Backup neural network.
Source: RJ Zatorre, et al. NAT. Rev. Neurosci. (2007)
In the picture, this person in the violin and the violin of the violin actually exercises a lot of our brain network. In this process, many brain areas have participated. At the same time It is a non -linear complex system.
In the treatment of depression and other mental illness, music therapy has been recognized and written into the standard of treatment. However, there is a big problem with it, which is obviously personalized differences. Some people are effective, and some people are invalid. While our laboratory is undergoing music treatment, we will use the wearable devices we have developed to record physiological signals such as the patient's brain electrical, ECG and other physiological signals. How about. At this time we adjust the music in real time, and then restore the balance to the healthy direction.
4
We used so many means and did so many analysis. What is the use?
Everyone thinks that medical care is very developed, but in fact, medical medical treatment has become a very large burden on their country. Today's medical expenditure of American medical treatment is close to 20%of GDP. Chinese medical care should establish its own model.
We believe that China's medical care should have a big trend in the future. First of all, it will shift from disease -centric to health -centered. This health includes a physiological, psychological, and even all kinds of health in the surrounding environment. It is the great health we often say.
In addition, our way of treating diseases will be transformed by treatment as the main treatment and management, and then the place where the disease intervention is transferred from the hospital to the community and the family. In the process, the theories we just mentioned will play a very important role.
Chinese hospitals are currently overcrowded. In fact, the establishment of hospitals should be used in essence to treat incurable diseases. For prevention and management, in fact, we can put them in family and communities. At this time, various wearable devices will be More important role.
For example, we can understand what state you are at this moment with some wearable devices. If you deviate from normal, then it may be to enter sub -health or even disease status. If we enter the disease, such as the sub -health state, we can detect it. At this time, we can intervene in advance to intervene in advance.
In fact, contemporary people, including many friends here, have accepted the concept of great health, so everyone is managing themselves with a very healthy lifestyle, but everyone is often used to use linear thinking to interpret our human body, as well as Information output from a non -linear and complex system for the environment.
Each of our lives is different, some people have a stronger immune system, some people have weaker ability to resist pressure, some people are young, and some people are late, so I suggest that you use more complex scientific and non -linear thinking in the future Look at our lives, manage our physical and mental health, and wish everyone a happy life!
Uncle Ku Welfare
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