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 systems and at different levels of description.
Indeed, a goal has always been to connect different levels of description. The focus of this meeting is clearly, but not exclusively, on the coordination dynamics of behavior and cognition. In future events the focus will certainly include other aspects, including the brain, development, disorders thereof and so forth. Hints of this will emerge from our first session on ‘Coordination of Brain and Behavior’.
In the last couple of days I have drawn up a Bibliographical Sketch of Coordination Dynamics in the form of a Table…Without going into the details, the first part concerns DIRECT PRECURSORS to Coordination Dynamics. These will be familiar to everyone, and include the research contributions and ideas of people like von Holst, Bernstein, Feldman, Bizzi and Turvey. Some of these ideas have developed on their own grounds since this early work.
For example, early ‘mass-spring’ notions of control put forward by Feldman have evolved into issues, e.g. of frames of reference within ‘the equilibrium point hypothesis’ along with other related ideas. I do not elaborate on these developments in the Table. The point rather is to acknowledge that Coordination Dynamics as we know it today rests, in the apt words of Robert Merton, ‘on the shoulders of giants’ some of whom are here today.
Coordination Dynamics proper-’the modern era’ as it were–begins with the work on spontaneous phase transitions in biological coordination and the signatures thereof that are typical of self-organizing dynamical systems in nature. The Table includes three categories: RESEARCH AREA, PUBLISHED EXPERIMENTS and THEORETICAL MODELING, the latter intended to replace the mostly verbal accounts of earlier times.
By the term THEORETICAL MODELING, I mean that the concepts of the theory of self-organization-defined by Hermann Haken as the spontaneous formation of spatial, temporal or functional structures that arises due to cooperation among the parts of a system-are used strategically in conjunction with explicit and detailed mathematical descriptions of the nonlinear dynamics. Of course, this mathematical penetration of coordinative phenomena began through the interaction of experiment and theory in the early 80′s.
I want to emphasize that not every experiment is listed, only those that have a pretty direct connection to theoretical models, in the sense of motivating them and/or testing them quantitatively. There is obviously much other experimentation and theorizing that are consistent with Coordination Dynamics, but they are not included in this Table.
All in all, I count 10 different research areas dealing with different aspects of spontaneous self-organization at both collective and individual component levels.
All the Theoretical Models pertaining to these research areas were motivated by experimental observations and predict effects that may be (and mostly have been) seen in experiments. Although there is much more to be done here, the progress has been considerable. I consider this evidence and theory about the spontaneous, self-organizing aspects of coordinated behavior as constituting the first phase of Coordination Dynamics.
The second phase brings in issues of perceiving, intending, attending, learning and so forth-so-called “informational” or cognitive aspects of the coordination dynamics– about which I’ll say more. Here I identify nine different research programs that meet the experiment~theory criteria.
In a third and obviously related phase, I list 5 separate theoretical modeling efforts having to do with EEG, MEG and fMRI measurements of brain activity and the brain-behavior relation, including the connection between different levels, e.g. the ensembles of excitatory and inhibitory neurons that compose different functional units in the brain, the intra and inter-cortical connections between them from which behavior and cognition emerge. You will hear more about this in the next talk by Viktor Jirsa.
Finally, I mention a long list of research strongly associated with coordination dynamics, including speech perception and production, visual perception, music, S-R compatibility, reaching and grasping, speech production and perception, cognitive development, long memory processes and so forth, along with a number of applications of these ideas in medicine, robotics, neuroscience, developmental and cognitive neuroscience, etc.
Now there is no doubt that there are errors and that I have missed pertinent work in all these categories. And if it pertains to work by members of the audience, I apologize in advance. Please take the Table as a beginning point. Now is the time to add your criticisms and suggested changes. Please pick up a copy and feel free to add to the list and make suggested changes with references if possible and return to Denise with your name (or you can remain anonymous if you wish). After the meeting we will collate the information and make it available on the Web for all participants. The hope is that it will be useful to everyone as a pedagogical guide and as an aid to planning new research. (And perhaps serve as a rejoinder to those who ask “What has Coordination Dynamics, and the so-called dynamical perspective delivered?”)
The Complementary Nature of Coordination Dynamics and the Origins of Agency: Directed Self-Organization
Now I’d like to move from the History of Coordination Dynamics to what it’s all about…and maybe what it even means. So what’s the problem of coordination all about? It is nicely captured in the quote by Graham Swift in “Last Orders”: “Things come together in this world to make things happen, that’s all you can say. They come together” So how do things come together, and when they do, what’s the nature of the coordination? What brings things together and drives them apart? We use words like coordination and its various relatives-binding, recruiting, grouping, orchestrating, communicating, integrating, selecting and so forth-but how do we understand these words? Are there rules or laws of coordination and if so what do they look like? Since it is we who draw up the laws of physics, what do we know about our own brains?
So what do we know about the brain?
Twelve years ago, this picture appeared in Science under the title ” The Mind Revealed?” It shows the work of Gray and Singer and a possible answer to the so-called binding problem: How do distant neurons responding to features of a single object, pool information together to create a coherent percept? The answer is that neurons appear to fire in unison. The fuss was about oscillations at about 40 Hz (the gamma frequency) that briefly occur in local field potentials and single neurons-sometimes separated by long distances across cortical columns and even hemispheres– when light bars of the same orientation moving in the same direction are presented to anesthetized cats. For us, the key point is that the oscillations are in synchrony with a relative phase of zero. The relevant information for the brain seems to lie not (or not only) in the oscillations per se but in the phase synchrony between them. More recently, the same kind of thing has been seen in work by Fries et al in Bob Desimone’s lab when a monkey attends to a visual grating (see “Drums keep pounding a rhythm in the brain” again in Science). There is a rapid increase in synchronization in the gamma range in V4 neurons when the stimulus is attended to, but not in V4 neurons to distractor objects. So whether it is the hallmark of perceptual unity, conscious awareness or a decision to focus attention, rhythmic synchrony appears to be crucial.
We know of course that the dynamics are far richer than that. For example, neurons of the brain do not have to be (and more likely as not) oscillating at the same frequency. Also, they don’t have to be in phase with each other. Indeed an advantage of a phase coding scheme is that the phase relation can take on any value between 0 and 2p. There is now plenty of evidence that abrupt transitions between phase relations can occur in both brain and behavior. So how does this richer dynamics come about? What factors produce it? Well, actually there are only two!!
Let’s look at the basic archetype of Coordination Dynamics, which has a fundamental Broken Symmetry, that is, the parts being coordinated are not identical. Nature thrives on broken symmetry. Let’s also recognize that nothing happens in biology unless there is interaction or coupling, from the molecular level on up. So these are the two basic assumptions from which everything else emerges.
Watch how it works. For ease of viewing, let’s fix the differences among the components and vary the coupling. Stable and unstable fixed points — equivalent to phase synchronized coordination states–correspond to the red and white dots respectively. Notice that every stable fixed point has a complementary unstable fixed point: Stability and instability, attraction and repulsion coexist. As the coupling strength varies, notice the fixed points collide in a so-called saddle node bifurcation. The latter occurs because the fixed points shift: the system adapts to the change in coupling, as many experiments have shown. Our Coordination Dynamics is therefore a complex adaptive system. This does not happen in the HKB model, which is based on symmetry considerations. Notice that our basic archetype exhibits the well-known transitions that have been observed due to loss of stability. Notice at a certain point all stability is lost, and the system then exhibits only tendencies to where the fixed points were-their ‘ghosts’ or remnants. These tendencies reflect a partial or relative coordination: the differences between the components are large enough, and the coupling sufficiently weak that there is no stable coordination at all. Actually I call this the metastable regime of the Coordination Dynamics. Notice, importantly, that when the coupling is restored we see the birth or creation of the fixed points. That is, informationally relevant phase synchronized coordination states are CREATED through metastable coordination dynamics. HOLD THAT THOUGHT!!
Now let’s look at an alternative-actually the only alternative-scenario in which the coupling is fixed and the intrinsic differences between the components are systematically changed. Neuromodulatory influences underlying attention, for example, are known to be capable of altering the natural frequency of neural oscillators (Kryukov, 1991). Now you see the same kinds of effects, but even more dramatically. Again: the stable and the unstable collide, the coordination dynamics lifts off the line at Ø=0, loss of stability and transitions between phase-synchronized states occur, the system enters the metastable regime where no attractors-only tendencies exist. Then, once more, one sees the creation of fixed points-informationally relevant phase synchronized states of the Coordination Dynamics.
I want to stress that all this happens on the basis of only two fundamental assumptions: a little coupling between components without which nothing much happens in Nature, and the reasonable assumption that no two components are perfectly alike, thereby breaking the symmetry of the dynamics.
Let me summarize with a few principles.
The basic two-ness of Coordination Dynamics, of course, is called bistability an essentially nonlinear phenomenon. Living things in general are multifunctional, and we expect coordination to be multistable. Yet most times they are studied doing one thing and we fail to recognize their multistable nature. I call this the CEVA Principle where CEVA stands for the Coexistence of Equally Valid Alternatives. In our simple archetype, the equally valid alternatives are in-phase and anti-phase. Which one is chosen-given a choice-is based on stability criteria (Liapunov). An intrinsic aspect of the CEVA principle is the Coexistence of Opponent Tendencies or COT; stability and instability coexist as the stable and unstable fixed points of the Coordination Dynamics. Perhaps you are beginning to see why I called this talk the Complementary Nature of Coordination Dynamics.
Transitions, of course, constitute Selection in Coordination Dynamics. One state is selected out of (here) two (in general, many). A kind of decision-making occurs due, in this case to instability. Hence, the SVI principle-Selection Via Instability. And last, but by no means least, we see the metastable regime. There is attraction without attractors, hence ASA (attraction sans attracteurs pour mes amis francais). This is literally the Principle of the In-Between (PIB).
In the metastable regime, the tendency of the parts to express their own autonomy and the tendency for the parts to work together coexist all at once. The question is not, as the history of brain research tells us whether the brain is segregated into modular distinct parts or integrated as a whole. It is both. Metastable Coordination Dynamics contains both integrating and segregating tendencies. Integration and Segregation constitute a complementary pair. Tendencies for Phase Synchrony coexist with tendencies for the parts to remain autonomous.
I have proposed that metastable coordination dynamics-in which there is a simultaneously ongoing interplay between phase synchrony (due to coupling) and phase scattering (due to independence among the parts)-is the main way the brain works. Measures of complexity by Tononi, Sporns and Edelman bear this picture out rather nicely.
In the metastable regime, Informationally relevant dynamic links among neural populations can be transiently formed and dispersed as the stream of perception, action, memory, flows. Obviously this is a spatiotemporal process, parts of the brain engaging and disengaging in time. The mechanisms by which this is accomplished are beginning to be revealed.
(Who would have thought, incidentally, that this basic account of von Holst’s relative coordination is the way things work? And who would have thought that one can see this in the brain?)
There is another reason for proposing metastable coordination dynamics as the essential way the brain works. It concerns an analogy to the way physicists understand how we know the universe we live in. According to Quantum Mechanics, out of a universe in which quantum indeterminacy rules-the wave function is spread out over all of space-nature selects an alternative. It creates information. The way this is done in practice is that a device is built in which its interactive material is placed in a physically, electrically or chemically metastable state. According to the late Quantum Measurement theorist, H.S. Greene (who worked with Dirac and other founders of QM):
“It is the observable transition between this metastable state and a more stable state that conveys the essential information concerning a sub-microscopic event that would otherwise go undetected… The functional material of the detector must be macroscopic and in a metastable state which allows the quantal interaction to become manifest at the macroscopic level”
Quantum Mechanics thus implies the creation of new information in the process of measurement and observation.
And guess where this leads us back to? We have seen in the human brain that information is created and destroyed in the metastable regime of the coordination dynamics, where apartness and togetherness, individual and collective, segregation and integration, phase synchrony and phase scattering coexist.
Metastable dynamics account for the origins of information. I happen to think that this fits both a Gibsonian and a Shannonian view of information. Information in the environment, for example, is created when animals move in it, discovering critical points in optic flow fields.
It is not a big step, then, to say that once created, this information can then guide, modify and direct the system’s dynamics. That too has been amply demonstrated in studies of intentional change, environmental change, learning and so forth. You will remember this picture from Schöner and myself of how intention-as memorized information– acts in the same informational space as the dynamics.
But now we see the loop close: SODS in the metastable regime create information and information directs the system’s behavior. So Coordination Dynamics as a theory~experiment research program is ultimately about Directed Self-Organization.
Now let’s close the loop even tighter and ask where does directedness come from? For us, I believe we have to ground the entire theory of Coordination Dynamics in the very source of living, animate form-movement itself. And let’s think about–even rather coarsely– what happens when human embryos develop. ‘Im anfang var die tat’, as Goethe said-in the beginning was the act. In the embryo, motoneurons appear well before their sensory counterparts as Viktor Hambuger and others showed.
The child is born with a large repertoire of spontaneous, self-organized movements-making a fist, kicking, sucking, etc. etc. Only at some point does the child realize-through his own movements and the sensations they give rise to-that these movements are his own. If one attaches a string to his foot, he comes to realize that it is his kicking movements that are causing the mobile to move in ways that he likes. He gets the unmistakable impression shared by us all that he directs his own movements…
From spontaneous self-organized behavior emerges the self-”I am” “I do” and from their a huge range of potentialities (‘I can do’). “I-ness” arises from spontaneity, and it is this “I” that directs human action.
As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone remarks, we literally discover ourselves in movement. In our spontaneity of movement, we discover arms that extend, mouths that open, knees that flex and so forth. We make sense of ourselves as living things. I submit to you that “Evolutionarily constrained processes of self-organization” –real organisms coupled to real environments which live in the metastable regime-are the origins of information and agency itself. Such information can modify (and be modified by) behavior as a Kinetic/kinaestethic melody ( to use Luria’s poetic words). This step may signal an end to false contrasts that have misled us between is movement “programmed” or is it self-organized? Coordination Dynamics I submit is a theoretical framework/research framework for Directed Self-Organization.
1. The basic duality:
For some strange reason the world of our perception comes in pairs. It is not difficult to document the ubiquity of paired concepts and descriptions of things throughout the history of both western and eastern thought, whether it be particles and waves, love and hate, yin and yang, mind and body, nature and nurture, genotype and phenotype, individual and collective, perceptual and motor, reductionism versus holism, learning versus innateness……The list goes on and on and on.
Science seems to thrive on this either-or scenario. In fact, modern science after Karl Popper is even based on it. Yet, by viewing problems in too narrow a way in the either/or mode of thinking and failing to see how two opposing views may be reconcilable, we limit our understanding. The route to discovering deeper ways of understanding lies in acknowledging the ‘either/or’ as ideal states of affairs, and appreciating the huge world ‘in between’ these ideals*.
How can things and ideas that seem entirely different, things that are separate yet somehow related, ever get reconciled? And could there be a scientifically based theory-at the human scale (leaving aside Quantum Mechanics for the moment) that attests directly to their Complementary Nature?
Let’s look for a moment at the basic archetype of Coordination Dynamics-the broken symmetry version of the so-called HKB model.
For things to come together, there must be interaction. How do two opposing tendencies –the tendency of the parts to express their own autonomy and the tendency for the parts to work together coexist?
This dual mode of thinking seems like a tragic paradox. But think for a moment let’s consider this paradox by examining the basic archetype of Coordination Dynamics in the context of current work on the brain. In studying the basic problem of coordination, very little in life happens unless two or more separate things come together. How can autonomy of the parts be reconciled with the need to coordinate the parts as a whole?”
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Miscellaneous Notes
In particular I want to return to ‘the two roots of coordination dynamics.’ By this I do not mean that self-organizational and informational aspects are two separate, independent aspects of Coordination Dynamics but rather that they are fundamentally complementary aspects of one unified framework. To bolster this claim I want to make a proposal about the origins of information, specifically that information arises from the metastable régime of the spontaneous, self-organizing dynamics and that it then-by virtue of memory– guides the dynamics. I call this directed self-organization. Directed self-organization can be grounded not only on current knowledge of what the brain does and how it works, but also on the fundamentally animate nature of life…that life without movement does not exist. Coordination Dynamics, I would claim, is a theory~experiment research program about Directed Self-Organization.
*That is the basic message of the most successful theories of the physical world that we have ever invented or discovered-relativity and quantum mechanics. That is the basic message behind Picasso’s great works such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in which he discovers how to represent figures from many different perspectives all at once.
We will add fuel to the fire of the last statement with a famous quote from Niels Bohr: “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”* Why would he say something like this? Perhaps because when one is faced with paradox and ambiguity, it means that one cannot easily decide that one complementary aspect is more fundamental than another. That they must consider the prospect that they are might be equally valid and fundamental.
The broken symmetry of CD. Two assumptions: the components are never exactly the same, and nothing happens in biology unless two or more “molecules” come together to form a stable form.”
