About This Lesson
Understanding complex causal and feedback relationships is fundamental across disciplines—from physiology to economics—yet existing diagramming methods struggle to simultaneously represent continuity, causality, and homeostasis in an intuitive way. This paper introduces a rule-based graphical system designed for universal pedagogical application, enabling learners to visualize and construct causal networks with consistent, domain-agnostic rules. The model’s axes represent system parameters (e.g., blood pressure, market demand), while curved sectorial vectors encode directional influences, unifying negative/positive feedback and homeostatic principles into a single scalable framework. By standardizing the visual grammar of causality, this approach enhances clarity in teaching and modeling dynamic systems without relying on discipline-specific conventions.
This work is structured in two complementary parts: (1) a theoretical framework introducing the axiomatic foundations of the system, including its scalable architecture, followed by (2) a core model (CM) collection demonstrating its utility through physiological case studies. The model’s dual presentation- from abstract formalism to concrete biological implementation- establishes its versatility as a pedagogical resource for mechanistic reasoning in physiology and beyond.
Note:
This work is part of the Core Models in Physiology system, which has been downloaded over 6,500 times (and counting) by educators and students worldwide.
The System's Foundation:
· Built exclusively on established medical literature.
· Designed as a complementary visual framework to traditional textbooks.
Its Unique Power:
· Provides a unified graphical language for causality and feedback.
· Scalable and consistent across all physiological systems.
· Proves its universal power by modeling diverse adaptive systems (from physiology to ecology) with the same core rules.
