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Coordination Dynamics

  • Living reference work entry
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Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

Definition of the Subject

Even before man speculated about the nature and sources of his own experiences, he was probably curious about the agencies by which animal motion was affected. Life and motion are almost synonymous terms. (Franklin Fearing 1930)

In his preface to the Principia, Isaac Newton speculated that not just the motions of the planets, the moon, and the tides could be explained by the forces of attraction and repulsion but all other natural phenomena as well. Despite the hubris, “self-motion,” Newton recognized, “was beyond our understanding” (Gleick 2003). Three and a half centuries later, the problem remains: the goal-directed coordinated movements of animals are not mere mechanical consequences of the laws of physics, at least as we know them. Despite the many remarkable applications of physics to biology and the entire fields devoted to them (e.g., biomechanics, biophysics, nanophysics, etc.) and despite the successes of modern molecular biology, the great...

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Abbreviations

Coordination Dynamics:

Coordination dynamics, defined broadly as the science of coordination, describes, explains, and predicts how patterns of coordination form, adapt, persist, and change in living things. In coordination dynamics the parts communicate via mutual information exchange and information is meaningful and specific to the forms coordination takes. Coordination dynamics embraces both spontaneous self-organizing tendencies and the need to guide or direct them in specific ways in a single conceptual framework. Life, brain, mind, and behavior are hypothesized to be linked by virtue of sharing a common underlying coordination dynamics.

Synergies:

Synergies (aka coordinative structures) are functional groupings of structural elements (e.g., neurons, muscles, joints) that are temporarily constrained to act as a single coherent unit. They arise in many contexts on many levels of biological organization, from the genetic to the social. Synergies are the key to understanding biological coordination and as such are the significant units of coordination dynamics. The synergy hypothesis is a hypothesis about how nature handles biological complexity.

Self-Organization:

The “self” in the word self-organization refers to the ability of an open system that exchanges matter, energy, and information with the environment to organize itself. Spontaneous patterns arise solely as a result of the dynamics of the system with no specific ordering influence imposed from the outside and no homunculus-like agent inside. Nonequilibrium phase transitions are the hallmark of self-organization in living things.

Collective Variables:

Collective variables (aka order parameters in physics or coordination variables in coordination dynamics) are relational quantities that are created by the cooperation among the individual parts of a system. Yet they, in turn, govern the behavior of the individual parts. This is sometimes referred to as circular or reciprocal causality. In coordination dynamics, the identification of coordination variables depends on the level of description. What is “macro” at one level may be “meso” or “micro” at another.

Control Parameters:

Control parameters refer to naturally occurring environmental conditions or intrinsic, endogenous factors that move the system through its repertoire of patterns and cause them to change. Experimentally, you only know for certain that you have identified a control parameter if, when varied, it causes the system’s behavior to change qualitatively or discontinuously, i.e., to change its functional state.

Metastability:

Metastability arises due to broken symmetry in the coordination dynamics where the unstable and stable fixed points (phase- and frequency-locked states) have disappeared due to tangent or saddle-node bifurcations leaving behind only remnants of the fixed points. Metastability is the simultaneous realization of two competing tendencies: the tendency of the components to couple together and the tendency of the components to express their intrinsic independent behavior. Metastability has been hailed as a new principle of organization in complex living systems, including the brain, reconciling apparent contraries such as individual and collective, part and whole, competition and cooperation, integration and segregation, and so forth.

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Acknowledgments

The writing of this entry was supported by NIMH Innovations Award MH 42900, NINDS Grant NS48220, the US Office of Naval Research, and the Pierre de Fermat chair of the Midi-Pyréneés Région for which the author is grateful.

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  1. Human Brain and Behavior Laboratory, Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA

    J. A. Scott Kelso

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    Robert A. Meyers

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Kelso, J.A.S. (2013). Coordination Dynamics. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_101-3

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