The FLOWer model of life, (aka The Standard Model of Life in the scientific community) is addressing the following problem:
We don’t fully treat psychology as a real science, getting the worst of both worlds:
It gets the downsides from being treated as a science (it’s abstract, hard to understand for the public)
It gets the downsides from not quite achieving “science” level (it rarely predicts results accurately)
-> Psychology could win the most from being made more accurate and illustrative.
Biology is extremely complex and thus so is neuroscience. But even though we understand little bits of biology and neuroscience, we treat them with the respect that science deserves – we admit what we don’t know and try to improve our knowledge every day, using clear definitions, scientific language and more or less working models of prediction.
Psychology however faces fragmentation, with competing frameworks that sometimes lack unified models and precise definitions. Instead of having scientific models, we have a strange mix of such models and… stories. Many of these competing stories partially work with objects that are entirely made up, just to fit in a specific concept. Definitions are lackluster, making some psychological theories vague and not up to the standards of actual science.
Since proving a psychological story right with experiments has in many cases proven tricky, psychology has an identity crisis where it doesn’t really know whether it’s close to being an exact science or despite our best effort this moment is far away in time. We have to make a choice – stories or exact science models?
But the main problem are the plurals – too much segmentation. Humans are one whole. We cannot have separate stories for what is going on in our minds and bodies, like we currently do in psychology due to the high degree of specialization of research. The reality is that we have one very interconnected brain. Since a complete brain story would be too complex and confusing, it looks like we have to choose models. However, how to collect data for the model, when people can only tell what is going on inside them in the form of a story? We start going in circles between those too. Until we remember that quality can solve everything:
- A complete story is also a working model with an output we can trust;
- A true, working model usually has the beauty and accessibility of a story;
So we end up needing a structure that is both true and visual/beautiful.
It’s counterintuitive because we’re talking about the brain, the most complex structure in the known universe but… this structure doesn’t have to be extremely complex. Here is why.
In network systems such as the brain, most signals go around a bit and die out. Only a tiny fraction of them are amplified by the system and lead to its change by creating small or large positive feedback loops (upward or downward spirals). Most of these changes are rather insignificant and only an even tinier part lead to large scale lasting change – the one a therapist would want to cause in their patient.
This means that most brain processes that don’t lead to upward or downward spirals, we can acknowledge but ignore. The inaccuracies of the model will be negligible. The model doesn’t lose a lot from being simplified and at the same time the story wins a lot, because a simple story is actionable!
The above is the main concept of our self-improvement system I Grow Younger, which predates The FLOWer model of life by 2 years. An important note is that I Grow Younger works best for non-clinical cases as with deeper trauma or severe diagnosis the coping mechanisms can require specialized attention outside the scope of our approach. Good therapy will always be a better solution than a one-size-fits-all system in such cases.
I Grow Younger is a very fluid model that relies on understanding your driving forces intuitively and engaging the subconscious in improving your life. Since we use a lot of chaos, environment shaping and situational, low-intensity but high-consistency exposure therapy to do this in practice, the method, while working wonders, is not exactly structured or easy to visualize. We cannot just turn it into a scientific model. There is one last barrier. We need a mirror structure of ourselves and life that we can visualize. It should:
- Be as close to a computational model as possible, governed by equations and able to generate output ranges for a given input, ones that correspond to reality;
- Have a clear data structure so a therapist can input all data they have about their patient.
- Represent all positive flows in human life such as self-love, unconditional love, empathy, meaning and creativity and make them just as fluid as they are in our experience;
- Account for all fears and barriers, both generic and specific, both conscious and unconscious, as well as all unresolved past trauma;
- Take into account every case where the world applies peer pressure on us, thus reducing our internal freedom;
- Have a specific representation for our coping mechanisms and how they influence the output of the model;
- Have a specific representation for our numerous comfort zones;
- Have a specific “switch” for our two main biological states – Hunter and Sheep mode.
- And finally, most of all… the structure should evolve in real time, just like we do.
While this seems too much to ask, we accidentally stumbled upon a structure answering most of the requirements and after some tweaking, everything fell into place.
The FLOWer Model of Life is this mirror structure. Using only flowing water, sand, gravel, rocks and boats, we can show you everything important that is going on inside you.
Even better, any therapist who has collected enough data, can use the model to show their patient a beautiful, highly visual, dynamic view of their life structure. A picture is worth a thousands words. A dynamic picture with flowing water representing your life in time is worth a million.
The model will launch as a computer simulation but given the natural abundance of the materials chosen, it can also be realized for real in special case demos without prohibitive costs.
The model input has no directly identifiable data (basically just a bunch of number parameters that the therapist enters – they cannot be traced back to a patient), making aggregate studies easy from a privacy perspective since data is anonymized by default.
While the model is still being developed, every single psychologist that has seen its components is in awe. It has the potential to turn the abstract concepts of psychology and therapy into something anyone can not only understand but also see with their eyes and feel with their heart. We believe this cause is worth it!
At the same time it may turn out that our computational model is so close to reality that with reasonable amounts of behavioral input data it will highlight hidden subconscious features of the patient, turning into a tool as significant for therapists as Excel is for accountants. We cannot be sure if this huge potential exists but if it does, we’ll explore it to the fullest, engaging the full power of machine learning and potentially, other AI approaches.
Stay tuned for updates!
By Kalin Karakehayov, founder of ImpactMindset.