Event

Lung environment interactions have the potential to trigger seemingly small changes in the lung, which may have much greater impact on the lung through Emergent Phenomena. Expanding on Peter Macklem's article “Emergent phenomena and the secrets of life” (J. Appl.Physiol., 104: 1844-1846, 2008), the session will review key concepts of emergent behavior where the spontaneous development of self-organized order among ensembles occurs, resulting in patterns that can be neither predicted nor explained by examining the isolated components. The session will explore the role of emergent phenomena in health and disease processes such as asthma, breathing during sleep, and pulmonary arterial hypertension.