It is for this reason that courage, resilience, perseverance, mature defense, or transformational coping, the dissipative structures of the mind, are so essential.
But I'm quite confident that ADHD among all the suggestions that being made in the past is the most plausible explanations for Leonardo dissipative genius and erratic behavior.
The Nobel Prize winning chemist Ilya Prigozhin calls physical systems that harness energy, which otherwise would be dispersed and lost in random motion, dissipative structures.
For example, the entire vegetable kingdom on our planet is a huge dissipative structure because it feeds on light, which normally would be a useless by-product of the sun's combustion.
And because without plants there would be no animals, all life on Earth is ultimately made possible by dissipative structures that capture chaos and shape it into a more complex order.
What transforms the consequences of a traumatic event into a challenge that gives meaning to life is what in the previous chapter was called a dissipative structure or the ability to draw order from disorder.