Do you believe disequilibrium motivates growth throughout life?

I think it is a constant process in life. Just recently, I thought I had gotten past some issues and wham! – they hit me in the face. I am just now beginning to “accomodate the new information.”

However, repetition was not one of them! (WTF?)

I agree with @janbb that disequilibrium is a constant experience through life only that as we get older the process is shorter lived based on prior experiences. Even if you expect the unexpected, there is always some element of dissonance in our day to day experiences that we have to wrestle with. ;)

It is the source of AFOG.

I don’t believe it’s the be all and end all. It’s certainly important, but it ignores the simple fact that some people just can’t be arsed to achieve equilibrium sometimes.

I don’t see how it’s the source of American Friends of Germany, though.

Yes. Any nonlinear dynamical system left at equilibrium does nothing but stay at equilibrium. That is the final state that the Second Law of Thermodynamics demands, after all. But pushed far enough out of equilibrium, a dynamical system reaches a set of crisis points that push it toward a strange attractor that is itself fractal. So down to the level of the Planck scale at least, the outcome is both self organizing and infinitely variable. It appears to descend into chaos, but there is an exquisite order withing the chaos. It produces things we can recognize as similar, but also infinitely variable.

It is an incredibly clever system. Wish I could have thought of that. But then, maybe aI am just a part of what did.

@the100thmonkey AFOG=Another F’ing Opportunity for Growth.

Not all theorists are absolutely correct in their assumptions about how the mind and body work. Theories are altered and added to throughout history. Piagets theories are grand up to the point of equilibrium and disequilibrium. IMO more current technology allows us to see that the brain is not fully developed until approximately age 23 and that brain anomalies impede that development to varying degrees in individuals. Each marker of cognitive development is corresponding with actual brain development and the dentritic connections that are formed at greater and greater levels. One could just as easily suggest that learning happens in cycles with some level of regression before a new cycle of growth begins.

While the findings of Piaget have been very relevant and useful for the child development professional, there are too many factors to rely on only one researcher.