An example of fractal geometry in nature
500 Words on Thursday | by Lee Schneider
I was in a room with people cheering about fractal geometry. Not a small room and not a few people — a couple hundred of them. Later, I was in another room to hear a doctor speak about female menopause and I stayed for the whole talk. Yes, the speaker covered prostate screening also and I was working, covering the event for the Huffington Post, but the speaker was that good. I looked around the room during both talks. Lots of everyday people. All ages. Hip and unhip. No Phi Beta Kappa keys in evidence, though one of the talks, the fractal geometry one, got technical as it delved into Mandelbrot Sets. There are times that I’d rather drive into oncoming traffic than try to understand what a Mandelbrot Set is, but the speaker was so good we were all on board.
It was science for the people.
The event was the I Can Do It conference in San Diego and it covered topics like integrative medicine, how to live in a state of happiness, (“Would Vermont work for that?”) and some fringy stuff, at least for me, like past life regression. (Why in their past life was everyone a king or a queen? Wasn’t anybody a garbage man in the Middle Ages?)
How do you get people to cheer for fractals? Science education is top-of-the-list for a lot of people. Educators worry that kids are turning away from careers in science. American Idol seems the shorter route to fame and fortune, and you don’t even need to know how to sing.
Elliot Washor
Elliot Washor is one of the people who’s thinking hard about how to fix this. In the US, one student drops out of school every 12 seconds. Elliot is co-founder and co-director (along with Dennis Littky) of Big Picture Learning. Big Picture has started new schools and changed existing schools. They’re willing to get their hands dirty – literally. Elliot wrote recently about a welding simulator that he thought was really cool. It empowered the operator to learn a real-world skill and some math, too. Michael B. Crawford, author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” has written compellingly about how people who work with their hands might be happier than people who push ideas around on computer screens.
Dr. Bruce Lipton
If you take the body out of learning – well, it’s just a lot less interesting to learn things. Why not keep it in? Include the tactile and physical part of learning and learning stays relevant. Why did those speakers I heard have people cheering? The answer is also about the body. The speakers were Dr. Bruce Lipton and Dr. Christiane Northrup, and they both had everyone’s attention for one reason. They were giving us vital information about our wellness, and everybody’s interested in that kind of science.
Science for the people reaches out to include persons of every age and gender. I might even go to another menopause talk if Dr. Northrup is speaking.
Dr. Christiane Northrup
Written by Lee Schneider
Bruce Lipton was telling me about Newtonian and quantum worldviews. Yeah, you can stop reading now. You have better things to do than know why self-help books won’t always help you or the real reason you think you need glasses. You can keep thinking of yourself as a victim of your hereditary fate and go get coffee. Really. See you here next week, but then you won’t know what the behavior of iron filings in a magnetic field has to do with anybody getting cancer.
Dr. Lipton is a biologist who got into quantum mechanics. That kind of thing is sometimes seen as a sign of instability, but I assure you that Dr. Lipton is quite lucid. Start with his take on Isaac Newton, who described gravity and the rules we use to understand the physical world. Newtonian thought holds that the material world is essentially everything there is. Nothing else matters. Now think about Charles Darwin and “survival of the fittest.” In Dr. Lipton’s view, put those two dominant thinkers together and we get a world where only physical stuff matters, and survival of the fittest means becoming the person who controls most of the physical world. But wait – life is also about the unseen, energy like electromagnetism and mental energy. “While you see and respond to the physical world, it’s the invisible world that is actually the shaper,” Dr. Lipton says. This is the quantum world.
Look at what happens when people read self-help books but never change. The reason, says Dr. Lipton, is because of the function of the conscious vs. the subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is associated with the authentic self and the spirit. The subconscious mind is about habituation. “You learn something and then it’s a habit so you don’t need to relearn it,” Dr. Lipton says. The conscious mind can read the book, take a test on the contents, and pass. But unless you change the habits of the subconscious mind, knowing the contents of the book won’t create change.
Scientists believe the habit-mind is running our everyday life, and according to Dr. Lipton, it is also determining our genetics. At Stanford University School of Medicine his research revealed how environment controlled the behavior and physiology of a cell, changing its genetic structure. That’s the reverse of the established view, which holds that our genetics are “locked” and unchanging. Put it another way, your dad wore glasses, your mom wore glasses, you will wear glasses. Genetics, right? Well, Dr. Lipton says genetics aren’t “fate” – they occur because your cells got the information that that’s the way life is: Everybody in our family wears glasses. If your cells received different information there’d be a different result.
This is getting kind of deep, so here’s a picture of how you can use a cat to prop up your iPad. 
Dr. Lipton wants us to know that we are not victims of our “hereditary fate” but can actually make lasting changes to cellular structure. That’s how our health is shaped by invisible forces.
Remember the high school experiment when you sprinkled iron filings on a piece of paper and put a magnet under the paper? Is the pattern you saw in the filings themselves or in the invisible magnetic field? What’s happening is a physical structure is reflecting an invisible force.
In pharmaceutical medicine, if cells get cancer we try to change their chemistry. But in Dr. Lipton’s view, optimum health means changing your belief system, not just adding chemicals to the body. Your cells, like iron filings, make physical changes when acted upon by unseen forces. Those forces can include environmental toxins, heredity, and consciousness. It means that the science of the physical world doesn’t tell the whole story. You have to consider the quantum world, where the universe starts looking less like a great machine and more like a great thought.
Dr. Lipton will be speaking at the Hay House “I Can Do it” Conference, which begins in San Diego on May 14th and goes on to other cities.
iPad photo courtesy Veronica Belmont via Creative Commons license.
