CONCEPT – The picture provides one view of our study of the complementary nature, that is entitled, ‘The Four Aspects’. The Four Aspects are: (1) The Squiggle Sense, abbreviated TSS (2) The Complementary Nature, abbreviated TCN, (3) Complementary Pairs, abbreviated CP, and are also called squiggles (4) Coordination Dynamics, abbreviated CD. Take a look at the picture, a tetrahedran with the four aspects...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO – “Despite all the successes of contemporary neuroscience in alleviating the many neuropsychiatric and neurological diseases that afflict us, we–us human beings–have not changed in any fundamental sense. Wars, poverty, rape, violence, fear, greed, power, etc. seem to permeate modern life just as they have for centuries. What can we do to change that, to change ourselves? Changing...
VIKTOR JIRSA – “Researchers in the field of Coordination Dynamics aim to identify general laws of pattern formation in human movements rather than searching for a locus of movement pattern generation. This approach is inspired by ideas borne by the theory of Dynamic Systems and Self-organization. Over the last two decades a rhythmic movement paradigm has been the dominant experimental task constraint in this...
THE COMPLEMENTARY NATURE – J. A. Scott Kelso and David A. Engstrøm. Cambridge (Massachusetts): MIT Press. ISBN:0-262-11291-4. 2006. Reviewed by Arthur Fabel. The 2000 United States presidential election was decided by some 500 votes out of 100 million, evenly split between conservative and liberal, red and blue states, rural or urban, and so on. The 2004 election was similar, and recently in Germany the vote for...
ABSTRACT – The basic reciprocity between individual parts and collective organization constitutes a key scientific question spanning the biological and social sciences. Such reciprocity is accompanied by the absence of direct linkages between levels of description giving rise to what is often referred to as the aggregation or nonequivalence problem between levels of analysis. This issue is encountered both in...
SCIENCE – Scientifically speaking, nature is grounded in the laws of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, a strange situation arises: atoms and photons can behave as either waves or particles, and which behavior is observed depends upon the instrument used to measure it. Although waves and particles seem to be totally different and apparently mutually exclusive descriptions of the quantum behavior, they are not...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO – “I thought it might be useful to say a few words about the history of Coordination Dynamics and to take stock of how far we’ve come and where we are going. It’s my hope that as a result of this meeting we can identify gaps requiring further experimental and theoretical research, with the goal of course of understanding the laws, principles and mechanisms of coordination in different...
“This marvellous book describes a wealth of biological features in terms of the structure of the underlying dynamical space, its bifurcations, and its attractors. This dynamical space is parameterised (say by the frequency of a gait), and as the value of the parameter changes, the dynamics changes, sometimes significantly (such as changing from a trot to a gallop). Moreover, the change can also depend on how the...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO -”Twenty years of empirical and theoretical research has demonstrated that basic forms of biological coordination arise and change due to self-organizing synergetic processes. Here we suggest, using facts and ideas from brain research and quantum measurement theory, that metastability in the underlying coordination dynamics is crucial for the creation and annihilation of meaningful information. Such...
In a recent 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...
ABSTRACT – Niels Bohr’s maxim contraria sunt complementa (contraries are complementary) indicated his strong suspicion that the complementarity interpretation of quantum mechanics might someday be expanded into a generalized principle. It now appears that such a principle has been found in metastability which appears at the scale of living things. Metastability has been proposed as a principle of brain~behavior, and...
LECTURE ABSTRACT – 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 “contrarieties” in the history of ideas (both in philosophy and science). We refer to all such contrarieties as “complementary pairs”...
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...
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...
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...
STACEY SINGER – Palm Beach Post Staff Writer – 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...
J. A. SCOTT KELSO - “…we need a science that embraces not only the extremes, but also the vast world of the in-between (Kelso and Engstrøm 2005). That science is emerging and has gathered a good deal of impetus in the last 25 years or so. In the literature, it has a name: it is called coordination dynamics. Ask yourself: Why do we talk about “instead of” and “versus” all the time? Why do we partition the world...
