A Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamic (NET) framework for sleep psychiatric disorders neurobiology and clinical ethics

Abstract

Contemporary research funding patterns generally encourage topic specialization, to the impairment of interdisciplinary perspectives. Sleep psychiatry requires many perspectives, including those of circular causalities. Now biological life at all levels depends on the laws of non-equilibrium thermodynamics (NET). So the NET framework considered will be a heuristic for inter-relating the levels of explanation. Rather than having unrelated explanations at each clinical explanatory level, the NET framework offers both a conceptual language and some suggested research strategies, from the cellular to the anthropological, for sleep psychiatry and other disciplines. This can be done by making changes in conceptual orientation. First, radiative energy and information are mathematically equivalent in form. Second, the notion of a dissipative structure (DS) as having a subjective inside, an objective outside, and a boundary assumes a distinct theory-building cosmology, separate from standard conceptions of time. Third, the DS is maintained by harvesting the intake energy/information and discharges an unused portion as entropy in a time-averaged manner, with some (but not all) of the discharged energy/information becoming part of the intake energy/information for another kind of DS. Entropy is not absolute, but relative to the DS. There are many levels of DS, and they interact with each other in any ecological arrangement, including within the brain. Such a reframing will have implications for reframing how clinical disorders are understood ethically in relation to the need to have social norms, so have a bearing on how the clinician can understand the ethical conflicts within her caregiver role. Some advances in the care of sleep disorders already have benefited from an implied NET framework. It is likely that this process will continue more rapidly if the NET framework is embraced more consciously.