The Universal & Atomic Elements of Organization
A falsifiable scientific theory proposing that the same irreducible structures organize both thought and reality — from the quantum to the social scale.
O-Theory proposes that four irreducible structures — Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) — form the universal grammar of organization. Rather than being merely useful ways of thinking, these structures are hypothesized to be the atomic elements from which every organized phenomenon emerges, whether in cognition, biology, physics, mathematics, society, or the cosmos.
| D | S | R | P |
| Distinctions | Systems | Relationships | Perspectives |
| Identity ↔ Other | Part ↔ Whole | Action ↔ Reaction | Point ↔ View |
| D := (i ↔ o) | S := (p ↔ w) | R := (a ↔ r) | P := (ṗ ↔ v) |
This is a living scientific evidence compendium: an open, continually evolving collection of independent empirical research, formal theory, mathematical proofs, cross-disciplinary analyses, applications, critiques, and proposed falsifications. Every entry is included because it supports, refines, challenges, or attempts to falsify the theory.
Scientific theories are strengthened not only by evidence that confirms their predictions, but also by surviving attempts to falsify them. This compendium brings both together: independent evidence from researchers who were not testing DSRP and proposed counterexamples evaluated against the formal theory.
One counterexample is enough to falsify O-Theory. Until then, the question remains: do the same four structures organize everything from quantum systems to human thought?
Independent convergence is one of the strongest forms of scientific evidence because researchers arrive at the same conclusion while investigating different questions for different reasons.
The number is not the point. Researchers in different fields, studying different questions with different methods, repeatedly arrived at the same structural predictions—almost always without testing DSRP or using its language.
Try a different term or clear the filters.
This compendium began as the peer-reviewed literature review “A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition,” published in the Journal of Systems Thinking with 109 studies. That paper is the peer-reviewed foundation. What you see here is its living, continuously updated version . New studies are checked before they are added, and the collection now holds and keeps growing. Open any card to see what the researchers found, why it bears on DSRP, and where the original review discusses it, the fuller account.
The collection is updated continuously, so the citation carries the date you consulted it rather than a study count — the count changes weekly, and putting it in the reference would make the same collection look like a different work to everyone who cites it. To cite a single claim or study, use its own address: every one has a permanent link.
This is the adversarial half of the compendium. Where the evidence track asks what converges on DSRP, this one asks what would end it: a single organized phenomenon whose structure needs a fifth pattern, a ninth element, or a fifth structural dynamic. It holds written up from candidates across territories, and resolutions — the general answers those cases settle against. Every case is published whether it held or failed, including the ones still open.
Cite this rather than the evidence collection when the point is what survived attack. The two are separate works with separate addresses: one asks what converges on the theory, the other asks what would end it, and a reference to the first does not support a claim about the second. Case and resolution numbers change when the record is revised, so cite a case by its own permanent link rather than by number.
This collection is meant to keep growing. Send us a study, paper, book or critique that bears on DSRP, whether it supports the theory or cuts against it, and we will read it and decide whether it belongs.
Ferrante et al., 2025, Communications Biology — Neuroscience
Patterns: Systems
A whole scene's neural representation can be rebuilt by algebraically combining its parts.
Using latent diffusion models applied to fMRI, neural representations of complex visual stimuli could be decomposed into and recombined from component concepts, so combining part-representations predicts the whole-representation in visual cortex.
To test whether human visual cortical representations are compositional — wholes built from separable, recombinable parts.
If the brain's representation of a whole scene can be reconstructed by algebraically combining the representations of its constituent parts, then the whole is literally composed of its parts. Purpose: To test whether human visual cortical representations are compositional — wholes built from separable, recombinable parts. Finding: Using latent diffusion models applied to fMRI, neural representations of complex visual stimuli could be decomposed into and recombined from component concepts, so combining part-representations predicts the whole-representation in visual cortex. [Added 2026-07-30 as new evidence beyond the original 109. DSRP structural basis: S (Compositional Identity): a whole is the integrated combination of its parts.]
Electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies have revealed how the brain encodes various visual categories and concepts. An open question is how combinations of multiple visual concepts are represented in terms of the component brain patterns: are brain responses to individual concepts composed according to algebraic rules? To explore this, we generated "conceptual perturbations" in neural space by averaging fMRI responses to images with a shared concept (e.g., "winter" or "summer"). After thresholding to ensure specificity, we applied these perturbations to the neural pattern associated with a base image, forming new brain patterns that incorporate the added concept. These modified brain patterns were then decoded into images using a pretrained fMRI-to-image decoding model. Qualitative and quantitative inspection of the resulting images provides insight into how the brain might combine visual concepts. For example, adding a "winter" perturbation to the brain pattern of a man on a skateboard yields a new pattern representing a man on a snowboard in a winter scene-even when the perturbation modifies only a small subset of voxels. Our findings reveal that compositional processes in neural representations may lead to predictable perceptual outcomes, as interpreted by our decoding model. This suggests that the brain's combinatory encoding of concepts may follow a systematic, algebraic-like process-what we term "brain algebra." Although our study is model-driven, it opens avenues for future empirical work into the mechanisms of compositionality in the brain.
These researchers were not testing DSRP. The finding is theirs; the correspondence to DSRP is drawn by this site.