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The latest Edge talk really blew me away. In super-short summary, Nicholas Christakis, MD, PHD, MPH (Masters of Public Health), talks about studying social networks not by topology, but by the flow of “stuff” through the network. To use his analogy, it’s like studying the physiology of the body as opposed to anatomy. I think that in the most common cases, when discussing social networks, or studying social networks, we tend to pick out the structure, the topology, as the salient feature. Here in the Edge talk, Dr. Christakis discusses specifically the study of the dynamics.

What was particularly interesting was what he and colleague James Fowler studied:  the spread of obesity through the network. I certainly wouldn’t expect something like obesity to move through a network, but the results say otherwise.  Dr. Christakis does make sure to point out, however, that for the cause of obesity’s movement through a network, there can certainly be other factors besides social proximity.

I won’t write much more about it, because if you’re interested I’d say it’s well worth checking out. On a side note, however, there’s one other specific point I found interesting, blockquoted here:

Again, the study of social networks is part of this assembly project, part of this effort to understand how you can then have the emergence of order and the emergence of new phenomena that do not inhere in the individuals. We have, for example, consciousness, which cannot be understood by studying neurons. Consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal tissue. And we can imagine similarly certain kinds of emergent properties of social networks that do not inhere in the individuals — properties that arise because of the ties between individuals and because of the complexity of those ties.

Today in my Philosophy of Mind discussion we were talking about levels of analyzing the brain. Our instructor, Dr. Andy Norman, said what I’ve bolded above almost verbatim as an argument against hardcore reductionist theory being able to provide a convincing account of mind. Then he went on to say that in a wide range of research areas the same problem of reduction occurs where a whole cannot necessarily be analyzed by its parts. Maybe he saw this talk too.