Jordi Soriano Fradera is a Spanish physicist and Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Barcelona, where he leads the Neurophysics Group and serves as vice-director of the university’s Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS). He earned his PhD in condensed matter physics at the University of Barcelona before completing postdoctoral research in developmental biology in Germany and in neuroscience at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. For more than fifteen years, his group has developed in vitro neuronal cultures and biophysical models to study how connectivity and collective dynamics give rise to brain function, and how they break down in neurological disease. He has collaborated closely with medical teams on Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s disease, and coordinated research under the EU Horizon 2020 NEU-CHiP project on biological computing. In this InterDialogue, recorded in Soriano’s lab among live neuronal cultures and imaging equipment, we trace his path from studying fluid fronts in porous media as a condensed matter physicist to a twenty-year career in neurophysics. We discuss how his group engineers rat and human stem-cell-derived neuronal cultures to model the brain’s structural and functional connectivity and to serve as disease models for Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s, the prospects and limits of cell transplantation and personalized medicine, and why Soriano estimates a twenty-year horizon before such approaches reach the clinic. We also discuss his work on network damage, resilience, and criticality in neuronal cultures, the NEU-CHiP project’s attempt to train living neurons to perform computation, neuromorphic chips that mimic neurons in silicon, and a striking experiment in which donated human brain tissue was made to play back a melody fed to it through a robotic piano. We close by considering the ethical stakes of coupling neuronal cultures with robots and augmented-human technologies, Soriano’s efforts to help build neuroscience...

Investment in science is a pillar for any dynamic, equitable modern society, and promoting scientific literacy across all levels of society can help foster innovation, dialogue, and consensus that crosses disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Science also helps to uncover answers to foundational questions that have captivated, confounded, and divided our species for millennia. But what is “science,” and what kind of “evidence” ensures that an approach is scientific? If we take “science” to broadly mean, in its purest sense, a “dynamic search for the truth,” or more explicitly, “the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence,” as the Science Council aptly defines it, then science extends beyond the established, highly specialized disciplines of reductionist natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geoscience, and space science) that have been so successful in fostering our understanding of our planet and the cosmos. Under this definition, science also includes the rigorous data-driven (qualitative and quantitative) social sciences, the inherently non-reductionist “holistic” sciences such as ecological and Earth system sciences, and the budding interdisciplinary field of complex systems science, as well as robust traditional knowledge systems based on multi-generational experiences, observations, and reasoning. As with science, “evidence” can mean a lot of things as well, including primary research, pre-existing data, past and planned experiments, and the referencing of peer-reviewed publications and primary sources. It can also include local and traditional knowledge, thought experiments, theoretical proofs, contemplation, verifiable personal experience, and empirical observation. Broadening and weaving together these forms of scientific evidence holds the potential to address complex, interconnected global challenges and explain deep mysteries that could help unify our polarized societies around foundational understandings. Foundational Questions Foundational questions can transcend the divides of generations and cultures: Cosmology, physics, and evolutionary biology have shed...

In this wide-ranging interdialogue, I spoke with Argentinian complex systems scientist Dante Chialvo. Chialvo is a trained biologist who has dedicated much of his career to working in, and collaborating with, physicists, and was at the forefront of a movement that brought many physicists into the biological sciences between the 1980’s and 1990’s. In the early 90’s he was associated with the Sante Fe Institute, and was a full professor at Northwestern University and UCLA, before returning to Argentina as a principal investigator for CONICET, and to lead the Multidisciplinary Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at the National University of San Martin in Buenos Aires.  Chialvo has researched diverse physical phenomena that cross many disciplines, based around scale-free non-linear dynamics, self-organized criticality, phase transitions and collective behavior, such as with cardiac arrhythmias, social insects, microorganisms and the immune system. But it is Chialvo’s wide-ranging work on the brain that he is best known for, and his pioneering work with the late Danish physicist and complex systems scientist Per Bak that explored the brain as a self-organizing critical system, has paved the way for much interdisciplinary research into neural networks and neuroimaging, including work on sleep, memory and psychedelics. Chialvo is also a strong proponent of universality as a guiding principle for scientific research and for uncovering fundamental physical laws, and we spoke about his paper “Life at the Edge,” which addresses the origin of complexity in nature through this lens of universality and fundamental physics.  We also spoke about the growth of complex systems science from a theoretical framework into a mature experimental science over the past decades, and also how the field is growing in different regions, including Latin America. We also discussed the importance of investing in science, and the troubling current circumstances for science, technology...

Traditional Indigenous territories are complex, adaptable, and resilient socio-ecological systems that contain the majority of the world’s biocultural diversity. But can Indigenous Peoples play a leading role in both combating climate change and preventing the next pandemic? Right now, there is a fair amount of rhetoric being flung about connecting, comparing, and contrasting the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change and the “sixth extinction” of biodiversity. In Indigenous worldviews—as well as in complex systems science—all these crises represent “maladies” caused by the profound unbalancing of our interconnected living planet. From his home in self-isolation in the Colombian Amazon, Koreguaje Indigenous leader Juven Piranga recently told me: “Our Elders agree that Mother Earth is causing this pandemic to clean the present state of the world, to rid us of the bad energies, and to counteract the pervasive greed and exploitation and disrespect. White people come here to our territories to exploit Mother Earth, for gold and timber and much more, and this affects everyone, and it is our responsibility to protect Mother Earth, so we are also punished. We need to reinforce our autonomy to stop these practices and restore balance.” While still not garnering nearly as much attention as it deserves, Indigenous Peoples’ role as partners in climate change mitigation is fairly well established in research, and gaining more attention internationally from both policymakers and the general public. The “Guardians of the Forest” paradigm recognizes Indigenous communities as stewards of the immense biodiversity and “ecosystem services” (or better, ecosystem functions) of tropical forests. Globally, the forested territories of Indigenous communities store at least 300 billion metric tons of carbon, above and below ground. Mounting evidence has shown that Indigenous communities with secure rights and tenure to their collectively held lands have extremely low rates of deforestation and land degradation. Additionally, while...

Our Elemental Origins It is easy for us humans – with our self-proclaimed superior intelligence over other species, and ability to innovate and exploit the natural world to our whims – to forget or ignore that we are in fact part of nature. This is not solely an existential statement, or even an acknowledgement of the dependency that we have on nature for our long-term survival as a species. From our behaviors and physiology, to the very molecules, elements and atoms that makeup the cells of our body, we are nature. One must even expand the meaning of “the natural world” to truly appreciate where we come from. The history of those aforementioned atoms and elements in particular, extends well beyond the evolution of our species, and even beyond the evolution of our planet and solar system. The fundamental building blocks that makeup our bodies and the diverse and beautiful planet that we depend upon, are born from the cosmos. To illustrate this interconnectedness between our existence and health, the natural world here on earth, and the vast universe, let us focus in this article on one specific element: magnesium. But before we do so, let’s give a shout-out to carbon, lithium, iron, gold and so many other elements whose multi-billion year biographies can also uniquely illustrate the connection between our present reality as resource consuming earthlings and the high-energy events that have happened during the evolution of the universe. Magnesium Magnesium is a metal with the atomic number 12, and is believed to be the 9th most prevalent element in the universe. Magnesium is the 8th most abundant element found in the earth’s crust, which is made up of approximately two percent magnesium through a range of compounds (it does not occur on its own naturally on earth). Magnesium is also the third most dissolved...