How do we stop the ‘spiralling out of hand’?

Doctorate thesis monograph in print (324 pages, ISBN: 978-3-8383-2438-8)

Reference: Bouchon, M., December 2009, How do we stop the "spiralling out of hand"? Understanding counter-productive effects that spiral out of hand, drift, scatter and waste, by imaging their basic topologic properties, Lambert Academic Publishing, Köln, Germany. Associated visual and complementary materials at: http://sites.google.com/site/howdowestop/home

The experimental basis for this work studied low-grade chronic illness, particularly those labelled 'not well understood' in the medical literature; the theoretical work on how these conditions are represented and managed led to introducing two new methods:                                             1-a method to apprehend as a 'integrative whole' map the existing representations from the varying field of cultures through the parameters they use (eg motion and direction; their word vocabularies, numbered values, and modelling images or symbols) : 'perspectival mapping'.                          2-a method for modelling situations globally: 'nexial topology' , using fundamental parameters such as motion and direction.                                                                                                   The Ph.D. thesis (2008) presents an original approach requiring a multi-media presentation (therefore with many files of different types: text, visuals, power point presentations, and animations).

The question of the nature of this 'Where' in 'Where do we stop?' (where is the stopping 'point' located? and in which space?) is a very ancient one (found already in texts from the archaic period). Answering it requires another way of looking at things than our conventionalised representations, and the cognitive experiments demonstrate this limitation and the requirement for a new approach to understanding, which commonly expressed by theorists in various fields. In this work, 'Where' is suggested as being in a topologic space, relevant to where a situation's development ends up, and to whence it comes.                                                                                                        The question of 'How do we stop?', is nowadays on many lips, with the habitual replies that if we slow down,we risk loosing all our human achievements, or that we really should give up some of them in order to slow down our rising problems, or the clamour, 'But we can't just stop!'. To understand how we can, without loss or 'lack of', and why our representations  as well as our 'advanced' topologies (or frameworks of thinking) eliminate this option, the moving geometry of a basic form of topology is more adequate, quicker and more intuitive to common sense. The animations are more convenient to get a sense of this topologic method because they relate more directly to some gestures and a general sense we have in certain situations.