The Biology of Resilience: An Introduction

The following is an accepted abstract submitted to The International Emergency Management Society Conference on biology being foundational to resilience.

Introduction

The following is the accepted abstract on biology and resilience I submitted to the upcoming International Emergency Management Society Conference. This year’s conference is held in November in Prune, India. In a move toward sustainability (and speaker accessibility), the conference allows talks to be delivered through Zoom. I spoke at this conference virtually last year and delivered a talk on how uncertainty can be managed through intentional processes of explaining where cause and effect are joined. Establishing (or re-establishing) relationships of cause and effect reduces uncertainty by providing observers with an understanding of the dynamics of a particular phenomenon in which they can be confident.

The key points of this talk arose from serendipity. I was pouring over a few of the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana’s (and company) texts, looking to better understand his use of love/acceptance in a social setting. I came across the role of the mood of acceptance in supporting social processes and a shared sense of humanness in a community, which is applicable to resilience. Later, Maturana describes how acceptance as a founding and shared mood creates stability, inner coherence, expanded intuition, intelligence, and understanding that allow communities to overcome disasters. It became evident that I would need to give a talk on this at some point, and I am happy with how quickly such a valuable opportunity arose. The main points came from Maturana’s work with others and were rearticulated and expanded by myself to scale the theory. I wish I had more room to delve into brain dynamics, such as Varela’s neuronal assemblies, work on time, and later work with others on embodied cognition. This will be my sixth or seventh conference talk this year; one is still possible but has yet to be finalized. It has been a great time so far, and I look forward to the last few.

Full title: The Biology of Resilience: A Dynamic Architecture of Mood and Social Relational Processes

Abstract

Exploring social resilience from a biological perspective through mood produces a profound understanding of how a community recognizes the hazards around it and engages with one another in a unified manner across disaster phases. The biological lens reveals a dynamic architecture originating with a mood and attached social-relational processes within a community from which resilience emerges. Although not everyone in the community may participate, they may still benefit from resilience-building.

Keywords: Resilience, Social, Community, Biology, Human

The Grounding of Resilience and Relational Domains

Social-relational processes arise from biologically based moods. Every mood, whether acceptance, happiness, or sorrow, is a biological process defined by patterns of nervous system activity. This activity leads to different moods and relational domains, further specifying how a situation is related to, including disaster. The grounding mood producing resilience is the acceptance of those beside us in our daily lives and includes cooperation and coexistence (Maturana & Varela, 1992). Maturana and Varela (1992) explain that the mood of acceptance is the biological root of all social phenomena and is necessary for socialness. Spreading the mood of acceptance requires communication, behavior, and intentional conversations. Acceptance remains foundational, while relational domains such as “fight,” “flight,” and “adapt” guide how resilience unfolds. Adaptation is foundational to resilience, but disaster severity may require flight. Other relational domains, including compassionate, friend, and affectionate love, deepen resilience. Far from romance, these relational domains expand the grounding mood of acceptance so the community may see each other in richer ways that build resilience through altruism, care, fondness, and unromantic love. In human ancestry, it has been theorized that communities with the grounding mood of acceptance were resilient to disturbances (Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008).

Moods and Biology

Mood shifts are changes in the distributed nervous system’s activity generated through sensory cells linked to motor neurons, connected through the brain, a mass of interneurons, in complex ways. This process involves the hypothalamus at the center of the brain, where social and instinctive behavior is regulated, and the amygdala’s emotional regulation (Maturana & Varela, 1992; Morin, 2008). How humans move changes what humans feel, and what humans feel changes how humans move in a flow of shifting moods. While the mood of acceptance is grounding to the community, other superficial moods will also naturally be involved. As moods transition, they are followed by changes that sustain the mood by permeating everything a human does, including what they observe, hear, and speak. Relevant to resilience, moods also alter how a human moves and acts and, most importantly, rationalizes, processes, and reasons (Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008).

Cooperation and Coexistence

The community’s grounding mood is acceptance, relating to other’s existence as one relates to one's own, and is joined by cooperation and coexistence, which could stand alone as moods themselves but are integrated here in acceptance. Coexistence arises when another’s existence occurs alongside one’s own, with little social disturbance creating a sense of togetherness. Coexistence also extends to the community’s physical and natural surroundings. It occurs when the community realizes they exist in the same space as hazards that may lead to disaster and must be prepared for. Natural hazards are not to be denied their existence by hoping they will not occur. Instead, as a stepping stone to resilience, their existence is treated as legitimately as any human in the community. A widened understanding, sensing, and anticipation of natural hazards and an awareness of the state of social-relational processes are byproducts of the grounding mood, opening intelligence by expanding acceptance. Cooperation, explained in detail later, is a “consensual activity that arises in…mutual acceptance in a coparticipation that is invited, not demanded” (Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008, p.56).

Denial

The antagonist to the grounding mood of acceptance and its integrated cooperation and coexistence is the foundational mood of denial, the illegitimacy of the other's existence. Denial conflicts with acceptance and undermines resilience-building. It leads to more of a local array of individualistic, isolated humans living in nearby dwellings than a community. Denial of one another's existence leads to indifference toward other humans, instability, lack of resilience, and an inability to survive a disaster (Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008).

Conclusion

Disaster effects may be asymmetrical. The grounding mood creates an unspoken social agreement throughout the community: if another human’s existence is threatened, those who can respond are committed to doing so. The grounding mood and relational domains of love underlie an automatic and cooperative response to help those whose existence may be in peril. Existence refers to “life” and the material things that make existence in the community possible and enjoyable. This creates cooperative action enjoyed by those involved as they share the pleasure of acting together while benefiting those in harm’s way (Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008). Harm may be the potential wildfire threat posed by vegetation on a property needing removal or rescuing others from a flood. If ecological processes that coexist with the community will soon impinge upon dwellings, those evacuating are assisted and welcomed to stay in unthreatened homes. After disaster, those with chainsaws clear roadways. Whether before, during, or after a disaster, humans in the community are driven by the same grounding mood and relational domains, developing the same social-relational processes underlying a resilient community. The grounding mood rooted in biology forms an intricate, omnidirectional entanglement throughout the community, where each other’s existence is as legitimate as one’s own. An architecture of social-relational processes stemming from the grounding mood of acceptance, coexistence, and cooperation creates a socially resilient community from a single, sustained biological event: a mood.

References

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1992). The tree of knowledge. Boston, MA: New Science Library.

Maturana, H. R., & Verden-Zöller, G. (2008). The origin of humanness in the biology of love. (B. Pille, Ed.) Exeter, Devon, UK: Imprint Academic.

Morin, E. (2008). California journal. (D. Cowell, Trans.) Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.