SOOOOOO ICY

Hey friends, ever feel like no one really understands the UNIQUE and incredibly COMPLICATED factors which drive YOU to psychic-emotional FRUSTRATION? Do you HATE it when your 'friends' try to rationalize your emotions away by an INFURIATINGLY abstract and impersonal analogy? Well, YR GONNA LOVE THIS:

"We all would prefer to have less personal experience with frustration, but the state of frustration also is an important factor in the way many systems in nature work," explains [Peter] Schiffer, who is a professor of physics at Penn State. "Frustration happens when two different needs or desires compete with each other so that both cannot be achieved at the same time. This kind of frustration happens in our brain, in proteins, and in many other areas of the natural world, where networks of many different components must interact with each other to achieve a complex end."

Schiffer explains, for example, that neural networks, which allow the brain to function, and protein molecules, which allow living matter to function, consist of thousands to millions of interacting components, and that a crucial element of these interactions is that they often are "frustrated." "When two different and competing signals are sent in the brain, the brain needs to choose which signal will dominate in order to take a particular action," Schiffer says. "Frustration happens even in a simple substance such as ice, which consists of only hydrogen and oxygen atoms, because there are competing forces on the hydrogen atoms pushing them between different positions relative to their neighboring oxygen atoms," he explains.

Understanding the consequences of frustration in an extremely complex system like the brain is very difficult, so there is a great deal of research interest in studying simpler frustrated systems, like ice, in order to obtain a basic understanding of the nature of frustration. One group of such systems are materials in which some of the individual atoms have "magnetic moments," meaning that each atoms is like a tiny bar magnet or compass needle. If a material has these atoms arranged in certain ways, the interactions among groups of magnetic atoms compete with each other, which leads to a state of frustration. These "frustrated magnetic materials" are perhaps the cleanest systems in which frustration can be studied and have been the subject of intense research...