Book Chapter by Armin Fuchs* and Viktor K. Jirsa*
1 Introduction
“Does old Scotty still make a living from finger wagging?” A question asked by an Irish man who had known Scott Kelso since both were children. The answer: “Yes, and doing quite well, actually” triggered the much tougher question: “What can be studied there for half a life span?” Such was not possible to respond in detail as we were at the airport in Miami and had to catch our flights. But the question remains, in more scientific terms: Why do we study coordination dynamics? Why are not only psychologists and kinesiologists but also theoretical physicists interested in finger wagging? Theorists appreciate laws and first principles, the more fundamental, the better. Coordination dynamics provides such laws. They are the basic laws for a quantitative description of phenomena that are observed when humans interact in a certain way with themselves, with other humans and with their environment.
2 Elementary Coordination Dynamics
The most basic phenomenon in coordination dynamics is easy to demonstrate: When humans move their index fingers in an anti-phase coordination pattern (one finger flexes while the other extends) and the movement frequency is increased, the movement spontaneously switches to in-phase (both fingers flex and extend at the same time) at a certain critical rate. This does not mean that the subjects could not move their fingers faster, say due to biomechanical limitations, in fact they can but only in the in-phase pattern, not in anti-phase. Why is that so? As with most of the ‘why’ questions the answer is: we don’t know. But then Sir Isaac Newton did not know ‘why’ the apple falls or ‘why’ the moon moves around the earth, however he had figured out ‘how’. So, how does coordination work and how can we describe or model its phenomena quantitatively?
*Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Department of Physics, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431-0991, USA
Book Info:
Book Series Understanding Complex Systems
Publisher Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
ISSN 1860-0832 (Print) 1860-0840 (Online)
Volume 2008
Book Coordination: Neural, Behavioral and Social Dynamics
DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-74479-5
Copyright 2008
ISBN 978-3-540-74476-4
DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-74479-5_16
Pages 327-346
Subject Collection Physics and Astronomy
SpringerLink Date Tuesday, December 11, 2007
