J. A. SCOTT KELSO – “This talk traced, in a somewhat personal and informal fashion, the origins of Coordination Dynamics and its evolution as a scientific approach to the deep problem of coordination in complex, living things. From rather humble beginnings, Coordination Dynamics has taken some unexpected turns and now figures quite prominently in a number of fields, both basic and applied. Some new directions were...
From Wikipedia on The Vitruvian Man: “This image exemplifies the blend of art and science during the Renaissance and provides the perfect example of Leonardo’s keen interest in proportion. In addition, this picture represents a cornerstone of Leonardo’s attempts to relate man to nature. Encyclopaedia Britannica online states, “Leonardo envisaged the great picture chart of the human body he had produced through his...
TSS: Here is one of the first scientific journal articles to use a squiggle (horse~rider) in its title. Using coordination dynamics to understand a complementary pair outside the field of coordination dynamics itself is an example of the “CD of CP” strategy. Here is an excerpt from the introduction, giving you the basic idea of the study: “However, the nature of the coordination between the rider and the...
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...
CONCEPT – Convection is a mode of energy transfer that involves movement of material in the middle, as opposed to thermal conduction or diffusion of matter. The matter is advected (carried-driving, but these terms are in fact unfit) by at least one fluid. In, individual coordinating elements begins to move spontaneously in groups near a heat ‘source’ expand, become less dense and rise, and those of the...
CHARLES BURCHFIELD – “An artist finds his happiest combination in a play of complementary colors. They are direct contrasts yet do not jar; they awaken the beholder, but do not disturb him.” “The charm of the season – and the day in particular – is to be found in the union of the two complementaries blue and...
JOURNAL ARTICLE – Reaction-Anticipation Transitions in Human Perception-Action Patterns Engstrøm, D. A., Kelso, J. A. S. and Holroyd, T. ABSTRACT We investigated the hypothesis that reaction and anticipation in human perceptual-motor performance are two coordinative modes of a single pattern-forming dynamical system, rather than separate behaviors. Subjects coordinated the onset of finger flexions with visual metronome...
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...
BOOK CHAPTER by EMMANUELLE TOGNOLI – The aim of this chapter is to present a framework of EEG coordination dynamics based on rhythmical entrainment of brain activity. The interest of continuous brain∼behavior analysis is underlined and its principles are illustrated with results from a dual-EEG experiment of spontaneous social coordination. The tilde symbol (~) was introduced by Kelso and Engstrøm to indicate...
RICHARD STROHMAN – “The 20th century is well named as the Century of the Gene. Biologists focused on establishing linkages of genotype (the genetic composition of the organism) to phenotype (what the organism looks and behaves like) and, in relationship to public health, to the mechanisms by which the phenotypes of premature senescence, disease, and death are encoded in the genome. All of the essential data have...
TSS - This popular illusion video is most often used as an “either/or test” of “left vs. right” brain people: “If an observer perceives the dancer spinning clockwise, they are a ‘right-brain’ person, and if counterclockwise, ‘left-brained’ person.” The squiggle sense smells trouble in such two-valued distinctions. We propose a different perspective, which emphasizes...
WOLFGANG PAULI – “To us, the only acceptable point of view appears to be one that recognizes both sides of reality—the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical—as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously.” “Shall we be able to realise, on a higher plane, alchemy’s old dream of psycho-physical unity, by the creation of a unified conceptual foundation...
DAVID A. ENGSTRØM – Ph.D. Neuropharmacology, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, department of pharmacology (1991); BSci. Pharmacology, University of California, Santa Barbara (1985). 2006-Present: Engstrøm lives and gives musical performances in Scandinavia. He is currently recording The Dialogue Of Clockmasters Show Rock Opera and working with Kelso on a sequel companion book to TCN called The Squiggle...
TOM HOLROYD – In school physics classrooms the world over, students are taught to use equations such as dx/dt = f(x, p) + H.O.T. to model nature mathematically. In such equations, f(x, p) is some linear function, and H.O.T. stands for Higher Order Terms, or in other words, stand for nonlinear terms of the mathematical model. Quite often when applied to real world scenarios, analysis of this kind of equation focuses...
DAVID A. ENGSTRØM - 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...
DAVID A. ENGSTRØM – “If I, for instance, speak the two words ‘body’ ‘mind’ together as written here, it is ambiguous what I mean, since I could be saying body, mind, or body/mind, or body-mind or bodymind. And depending on who you are talking to, each of these variations can convey quite different meanings. Contrariwise, If I say ‘body squiggle mind’ or ‘the squiggle body~mind’, in ...
A considerable amount of evidence and theory suggests that transient, short-lived phase-coupled oscillations within and between specialized areas of the brain provide a mechanism for neural integration. The idea is that these oscillations are coupled or “bound” together into a coherent network when people attend to a stimulus, perceive, remember, think and act. However, information processing in the brain requires a...
