Attractors are born when a group of unrelated elements align and influence each other in ways that create coherent patterns.

These patterns scaffold our experiences of the world.

Attractors are essentially low-energy states – which means they are easy to fall into – and are used to explain change-resistant patterns in everything from cells to galaxies.

Our experiences of different situations are shaped by our psychosocial landscapes for them, which are composed of different attractors and repellers from the past.

Attractor landscapes affect our experiences and responses to polarization and conflict – well beyond the issues in contention.

Attractor landscapes can become intractable when they become self-organizing, hyper-coherent and simplistic – then all roads lead to pathological polarization.

At this stage attractor dynamics are usually fractal – which means their us-vs-them patterns are repeated from our brains to our social interactions to our cultures.

When this occurs, the laws for how things change, change.

The Seven Crude Laws for Nonlinear Change explain how.