This is just the place where Aaron and Brent should publish this article about fractals in physiology. You may know, they are the organizers of the Ancetral Health Symposium; Aaron being a professor of psychology at UCLA and Brent being a first year medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School.
Brent has been a subscriber to my site for years and a reader before that, when it was open to all. Brent took an evolutionary fitness (my first name for my model) approach to golf and did very well with it. Not only did he become leaner, stronger, and more fit, he approached the game differently. He treated the golf course as a savanna, which it resembles closely with the patches of grass and trees and water hazards, and played as though he were a hunter gatherer tracking prey. I have to admit, I never tried or thought of golf that way. I thought it was a place were old elephants went to die.
In their article, Aaron P. Blaisdell & Brent C. Pottenger (in press). From heart beats to health recipes: The role of fractal physiology in the Ancestral Health movement. Frontiers in Physiology, Aaron and Brent have this exquisite paragraph (which they have given me permission to post).
If Ancestral Health is defined as an umbrella conceptual framework for viewing human health through the context of our unique ancestral histories as human beings, then the underlying interactions between the people involved in the Ancestral Health movement provide ample opportunity to observe how social and physiological phenomena cross-link on many different scales across space and time. In 2011, the authors co-organized the first annual Ancestral Health Symposium (AHS) at the University of California, Los Angeles, and this historic event united physicians, research scientists, and laypeople from all walks of life who are passionate about finding ways to improve health in the present by respecting how we got here in the first place. This fractal perspective blossomed into a social movement thanks to several early entrepreneurs who applied fractal mathematical models to human health. In particular, Arthur DeVany (author of The New Evolution Diet, 2011, and Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Movie Industry, 2003) of the University of California, Irvine, studied fractals in the movie industry, building mathematical models that showed how success in the movie industry is a dance with nonlinear chance, resulting in unpredictable exponential payoffs. In the late 1990s, Professor DeVany began sharing his ideas about Evolutionary Fitness and its fractal underpinnings on his Web site, including essays about how heart cells evolved the ability to convey complex information within the body through multifractal neuron firing and subsequent muscle contraction patterns (Goldberger et al., 2002); and, about how human movement patterns should be fractal, just as animals and hunter-gatherers move naturally in the wild (as demonstrated by numerous foraging and predator-prey models), in order to feedback and strengthen the underlying fractal physiological signaling in nervous systems. From these humble beginnings, a social movement started coalescing as more and more people saw value in applying an evolutionary framework to the modern human ecological niches and all of its health challenges, and this growth snowballed throughout both the professional and lay communities, morphing into the momentum that made the first Ancestral Health Symposium a reality.
