The picture to the left is one way to sum things up, that is to give you  ‘the big picture’, the overview. You’ve got TSS for The Squiggle Sense, TCN for The Complementary Nature, CP for complementary pairs (also called squiggles), and CD for Coordination Dynamics. All of these aspects are inextricable, dynamic and complementary. Having one implies you’ve got the other three, even if their can’t easily be seen...

Do you grok your own brain~mind? Would you like to? Grokking the squiggle sense is a step in the right direction! To grok (pronounced /ˈɡrɒk/) is to share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity.’ The prolific science~fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein’s view of quantum theory, grokking is the...

“In coordination dynamics, where apartness and togetherness coexist as a complementary pair—where a whole is a part and a part is a whole—there are no equilibria, no fixed points at all.” TCN — J. A. Scott Kelso & David A. Engstrøm “In coordination dynamics, where apartness and togetherness coexist as a complementary pair-where a whole is a part and a part is a whole- there are no equilibria, no fixed

by J. A. Scott Kelso* and Emmanuelle Tognoli* ABSTRACT Metastability has been proposed as a new principle of behavioral and brain function and may point the way to a truly complementary neuroscience. From elementary coordination dynamics we show explicitly that metastability is a result of a symmetry breaking caused by the subtle interplay of two forces: the tendency of the components to couple together and the tendency of the components to...

Max Planck Researchers in Berlin show that for electrons from nitrogen molecules, the wave~particle character exists simultaneously Electron Cloud One way of visualising the electron is to imagine it as a cloud moving around the nucleus. The thickness of the cloud represents the probability that the electron could be found in that location thicker cloud means a higher probability, thinner, lower probability. The image below shows two...

by J. A. Scott Kelso This lecture comes in three “movements” and arises out of a new book (Kelso, J.A.S. & D.A. Engstrom, The Complementary Nature, (2006 MIT Press). The first movement explores the central role of ubiquitous “contrarities” in the history of ideas (both in philosophy and science). We refer to all such contrarities as “complementary pairs” and introduce a novel syntax with which to...

By Stacey Singer, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer (Original Article – June 19, 2006)  pdf One hundred billion neurons, packed to the size of two fists, control what we see, do and feel. The tools of modern medicine allow scientists to see the living brain, to map its intricate geography and learn about its chemistry. But understanding how it actually works raises questions for Florida Atlantic University Professor J.A. Scott Kelso about...

In Squigglespeak posts, we talk about the squiggle sign (~), and give examples of its use by ourselves and others… The following excerpt comes from the article by Fred Cummins, Deep Affordance: Seeing the Self in the World: Fred Cummins – Cognitive Science Programme – University College Dublin “Let us now consider the Umwelt of the E. Coli bacterium in this cartoonishly simple sketch. As we have caricatured things...

part of the whole, whole of the part, beginning~ending, together~apart. sentient being~becomings, progress~regress, more~less, accidentally~on purpose. metastable state~tendencies, create~annihilate functional information, enfolding~exfolding flight~pearchings, integrating~segregating boundary~domains, it’s self-organizing~informational dynamics, the coordination dynamics of its individual~collectives, its converging~diverging...

In a just released scientific journal article entitled ‘Virtual Partner Interaction (VPI): Exploring Novel Behaviors via Coordination Dynamics’, brain scientists Kelso, de Guzman, Reveley and Tognoli have introduced ‘Virtual Partner Interaction (VPI)’: “a coupled dynamical system for studying real time interaction between a human and a machine. In this proof of concept study, human subjects coordinate hand...