The Fractal Structure of Development

The Development Fractal in the abstract

Development is a transformation. It is growth. It's what connects a tiny seed to a towering tree.

We are in a constant process of development, as individuals and as a collective. Our brains are constantly changing, from birth until death, in a process called neuroplasticity.

The structure and complexity of nature, of your brain, and of life in every form, is built on repeating patterns, layers of development that stack on one another. Life is Fractal.

What's a fractal?

A fractal is a structure that has Self Similarity, and can grow to infinite complexity from simple rules. In math, fractals can be generated by simple equations that are infinite, with the exact same pattern repeating at the largest and smallest scales.

Under nature, the rules are less simple, but the same principles hold. One fractal that permeates all complex life is the Branching structure. Everything from a tree branch to a head of broccoli to the blood coursing through your veins flows in a branched structure. Water forms branches naturally, whether it's at the microscopic scale of an ice crystal or the continent-wide scale of a river.

Branched structures can be understood in terms of connectivity and terminal units. Terminal units are the part of a structure that have an effect. Whether we are talking about the leaves at the end of a tree branch, or the tiny capillaries where blood reaches your tissues, at the terminal end of the smallest branches is where things happen

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Neurons are the branched structure that your brain is built on. The synapse is the terminal unit where one neuron communicates its information with another, or with a muscle, or with a gland.

All of behavior is built on relatively simple rules, amplified and stacked on each other thousands of times. These simple rules are the same rules that form the structure of neurons. Individual neurons, networks of neurons, and entire behaviors all work in the same way. The way that two people interact, or a hundred, or a hundred thousand, also works on the exact same principles. This is the power of fractals. If we understand the principles, we can understand the entire structure, even if we don't always know what emergent properties the structure will have.

consider that the brain has 86 billion neurons, each of which makes on average 7,000 connections

So what drives these fractals?

Feedback loops form the most basic fractal structure. Branches are an expression of feedback loops. The earliest animals to evolve neurons had both sensory neurons and motor neurons. The sensory neurons bring in energy or information from the world, and the motor neurons put energy and information back out. There are feedback loops in every synapse (the connection point between neurons). The brain has between 100 billion and 1 quadrillion synapses.

That's a heck of a lot of feedback loops. Fortunately, the structure doesn't change (yay fractals!) so we don't have to keep track of the whole quadrillion to make sense of things.

Basic sensory development works on the same structure. The brain imprints the structure of the world, which helps it grow into shape. Babies learn that gravity goes down, that objects have permanence, and what kinds of sounds their ears can hear. Before too long, they've imprinted enough to start putting energy back out, moving things around, making their own sounds in the same pattern they imprinted, and pretty soon they're leaving home to make it on their own in the big bad world. They take with them all of the imprinted behaviors of childhood, and start using them to interact with the world.

Everyone knows that what you're exposed to is important, that we learn a lot as we grow up, that we imprint the structure of the relationships around us. The same developmental fractal of imprinting also forms our basic, fundamental ability to perceive the world. We tend to think that we all have a baseline level of functionality, but every system, no matter how simple, will not develop unless exposed to suitable stimulus.

Consider an experiment on newborn kittens. A litter of kittens was split into two groups, a Horizontal group and a Vertical group. The Vertical group was raised in a cage wall-papered with vertical line. While they were developing, they only saw vertical lines.

When both groups of kittens had developed and turned loose into the unmediated world, they were Blind to the "other" orientation. Horizontal kittens couldn't even perceive vertical lines at all, even though their eyes were anatomically correct. Researchers let them walk around a room with a chair, and the kittens' poor little brains couldn't handle it.

The Horizontal kittens would walk right into a chair's legs; their brains couldn't receive the solid vertical mass right in front of them. Fortunately, they could see the seat of the chair, and hopped up there to nap and escape the stress of bonking invisible poles head on.

The Vertical kittens had no problem with the legs of the chair, but couldn't perceive the seat at all, so they missed out on nap time.

We like to think our vision is simply receiving the world, but that isn't true. It's grown from the fractal structure of imprinting; what we see is a reflection of our own imprint, to such an extent that it's possible to walk right into a vertical pole if you develop on the wrong set of stimulus.

The same fractal is everywhere

Every aspect of the brain, every network, every behavior, works on the same Fractal structure; we imprint the structure of the world, that structure forms the structure of our brain, and we interact with the world using that structure.

Think about a baby knocking over a stack of blocks; the first time they realize that they can affect the world, they're overjoyed. They've taken in their sensory reality, processed it, and taken that information and changed the world. They've discovered their own agency.

This same structure - imprint → plastic change → agency → affect - is what underlies all of our development of coordinated motion. We explore the world by a process called interrogatory motion, which is a fancy way of saying we reach out and see what happens. We explore. We knock over a stack of blocks, and use the information we discover to form another imprint. It's a cycle, it's a loop, a Fractal.

This same structure goes forever. Eventually we progress out of basic coordination into complex coordination, like playing sports, learning instruments, writing and drawing. We learn to coordinate basic sounds into words, and then into sentences, and then into the rich and complex language of adult humans.

Every system of your brain works on the same fractal, from your basic senses to your most complex systems of thinking and emotion. It's all based on imprinting, and exposure, transformed into action. People like to say that they're innately bad at something, like "I'm not creative" or "I could never be on a stage," but that belief is not based on reality, but on fear. Every aspect of the brain can be learned, it's just a matter of breaking down the progress into small imprints (like the small branches at the end of a tree branch) that your brain can handle, and building on them over time, layer by layer.

The way we interact with each other is the same Form. When we interact, we imprint each other's behavior, words, body language etc. Our opinions and beliefs, our skills and abilities, are imprinted from each other. The way that large groups of people interact is the same, feedback loops and information.

The most important source of information, of developmental stimulus, is unmediated Nature. When people interact with Nature, they come to the same conclusions and value the same things; they identify with life itself. Only when artificial realities are constructed do people start coming to different conclusions and identifying with ideologies and hypotheticals rather than the real world.

The same fractal structure is in all life, not just in the brain. It's present at the largest systemic level, with structures made of millions of people, and in every tiny piece of life you care to stick under a microscope. Even the water is the same shape, the same repeating pattern across the entire planet.

Jared