This book brings together scientists from all over the world who have defined and developed the field of Coordination Dynamics. Grounded in the concepts of self-organization and the tools of nonlinear dynamics, appropriately extended to handle informational aspects of living things, Coordination Dynamics aims to understand the coordinated functioning of a variety of different systems at multiple levels of description. The book addresses the themes of Coordination Dynamics and Dynamic Patterns in the context of the following topics: Coordination of Brain and Behavior, Perception-Action Coupling, Control, Posture, Learning, Intention, Attention, and Cognition.

One of the most striking features of Coordination Dynamics is its interdisciplinary character. The problems we are trying to solve in this field range from behavioral phenomena of interlimb coordination and coordination between stimuli and movements (perception-action tasks) through neural activation patterns that can be observed during these tasks to clinical applications and social behavior. It is not surprising that close collaboration among scientists from different fields as psychology, kinesiology, neurology and even physics are imperative to deal with the enormous difficulties we are facing when we try to understand a system as complex as the human brain. The chapters in this volume are not simply write-ups of the lectures given by the experts at the meeting but are written in a way that they give sufficient introductory information to be comprehensible and useful for all interested scientists and students.

An examination of how widely distributed and specialized activities of the brain are flexibly and effectively coordinated. A fundamental shift is occurring in neuroscience and related disciplines. In the past, researchers focused on functional specialization of the brain, discovering complex processing strategies based on convergence and divergence in slowly adapting anatomical architectures. Yet for the brain to cope with ever-changing and unpredictable circumstances, it needs strategies with richer interactive short-term dynamics. Recent research has revealed ways in which the brain effectively coordinates widely distributed and specialized activities to meet the needs of the moment. This book explores these findings, examining the functions, mechanisms, and manifestations of distributed dynamical coordination in the brain and mind across different species and levels of organization. The book identifies three basic functions of dynamic coordination: contextual disambiguation, dynamic grouping, and dynamic routing. It considers the role of dynamic coordination in temporally structured activity and explores these issues at different levels, from synaptic and local circuit mechanisms to macroscopic system dynamics, emphasizing their importance for cognition, behavior, and psychopathology. Contributors Evan Balaban, György Buzsáki, Nicola S. Clayton, Maurizio Corbetta, Robert Desimone, Kamran Diba, Shimon Edelman, Andreas K. Engel, Yves Fregnac, Pascal Fries, Karl Friston, Ann Graybiel, Sten Grillner, Uri Grodzinski, John-Dylan Haynes, Laurent Itti, Erich D. Jarvis, Jon H. Kaas, J.A. Scott Kelso, Peter König, Nancy J. Kopell, Ilona Kovács, Andreas Kreiter, Anders Lansner, Gilles Laurent, Jörg Lücke, Mikael Lundqvist, Angus MacDonald, Kevan Martin, Mayank Mehta, Lucia Melloni, Earl K. Miller, Bita Moghaddam, Hannah Monyer, Edvard I. Moser, May-Britt Moser, Danko Nikolic, William A. Phillips, Gordon Pipa, Constantin Rothkopf, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Steven M. Silverstein, Wolf Singer, Catherine Tallon-Baudry, Roger D. Traub, Jochen Triesch, Peter Uhlhaas, Christoph von der Malsburg, Thomas Weisswange, Miles Whittington, Matthew Wilson

How is free will possible in the light of the physical and chemical underpinnings of brain activity and recent neurobiological experiments? How can the emergence of complexity in hierarchical systems such as the brain, based at the lower levels in physical interactions, lead to something like genuine free will? The nature of our understanding of free will in the light of present-day neuroscience is becoming increasingly important because of remarkable discoveries on the topic being made by neuroscientists at the present time, on the one hand, and its crucial importance for the way we view ourselves as human beings, on the other. A key tool in understanding how free will may arise in this context is the idea of downward causation in complex systems, happening coterminously with bottom up causation, to form an integral whole. Top-down causation is usually neglected, and is therefore emphasized in the other part of the book’s title. The concept is explored in depth, as are the ethical and legal implications of our understanding of free will. This book arises out of a workshop held in California in April of 2007, which was chaired by Dr. Christof Koch. It was unusual in terms of the breadth of people involved: they included physicists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and theologians. This enabled the meeting, and hence the resulting book, to attain a rather broader perspective on the issue than is often attained at academic symposia. The book includes contributions by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, George F. R. Ellis , Christopher D. Frith, Mark Hallett, David Hodgson, Owen D. Jones, Alicia Juarrero, J. A. Scott Kelso, Christof Koch, Hans Küng, Hakwan C. Lau, Dean Mobbs, Nancey Murphy, William Newsome, Timothy O’Connor, Sean A.. Spence, and Evan Thompson.

Complexity science has been a source of new insight in physical and social systems and has demonstrated that unpredictability and surprise are fundamental aspects of the world around us. This book is the outcome of a discussion meeting of leading scholars and critical thinkers with expertise in complex systems sciences and leaders from a variety of organizations, sponsored by the Prigogine Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the Plexus Institute, to explore strategies for understanding uncertainty and surprise. Besides contributions to the conference, it includes a key digest by the editors as well as a commentary by the late nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, "Surprises in half of a century". The book is intended for researchers and scientists in complexity science, as well as for a broad interdisciplinary audience of both practitioners and scholars. It will well serve those interested in the research issues and in the application of complexity science to physical and social systems.

Complex systems in nature are those with many interacting parts, all capable of influencing global system outcomes. There is a growing body of research that has modeled sport performance from a complexity sciences perspective, studying the behavior of individual athletes and sports teams as emergent phenomena which self-organise under interacting constraints. This book is the first to bring together experts studying complex systems in the context of sport from across the world to collate core theoretical ideas, current methodologies and existing data into one comprehensive resource. It offers new methods of analysis for investigating representative complex sport movements and actions at an individual and team level, exploring the application of methodologies from the complexity sciences in the context of sports performance and the organization of sport practice. Complex Systems in Sport is important reading for any advanced student or researcher working in sport and exercise science, sports coaching, kinesiology or human movement.

Although still true to its original focus on the person–machine interface, the field of human factors psychology (ergonomics) has expanded to include stress research, accident analysis and prevention, and nonlinear dynamical systems theory (how systems change over time), human group dynamics, and environmental psychology. Reflecting new developments in the field, Human Factors Engineering and Ergonomics: A Systems Approach, Second Edition addresses a wide range of human factors and ergonomics principles found in conventional and twenty-first century technologies and environments. Based on the author’s thirty years of experience, the text emphasizes fundamental concepts, systems thinking, the changing nature of the person-machine interface, and the dynamics of systems as they change over time. See What’s New in the Second Edition: Developments in working memory, degrees of freedom in cognitive processes, subjective workload, decision-making, and situation awareness Updated information on cognitive workload and fatigue Additional principles for HFE, networks, multiple person-machine systems, and human-robot swarms Accident analysis and prevention includes resilience, new developments in safety climate, and an update to the inventory of accident prevention techniques and their relative effectiveness Problems in "big data" mining Psychomotor control and its relevance to human-robot systems Navigation in real-world environment Trust in automation and augmented cognition Computer technology permeates every aspect of the human–machine system, and has only become more ubiquitous since the previous edition. The systems are becoming more complex, so it should stand to reason that theories need to evolve to cope with the new sources of complexity. While many books cover traditional topics and theory, they to not focus on the practical problems students will face in the future. With broad coverage that ranges from physical ergonomics to cognitive aspects of human-machine interaction and includes dynamic approaches to system failure, this book increases the number of methods and analytical tools that are available for the human factors researcher.

Our contemporary understanding of brain function is deeply rooted in the ideas of the nonlinear dynamics of distributed networks. Cognition and motor coordination seem to arise from the interactions of local neuronal networks, which themselves are connected in large scales across the entire brain. The spatial architectures between various scales inevitably influence the dynamics of the brain and thereby its function. But how can we integrate brain connectivity amongst these structural and functional domains? Our Handbook provides an account of the current knowledge on the measurement, analysis and theory of the anatomical and functional connectivity of the brain. All contributors are leading experts in various fields concerning structural and functional brain connectivity. In the first part of the Handbook, the chapters focus on an introduction and discussion of the principles underlying connected neural systems. The second part introduces the currently available non-invasive technologies for measuring structural and functional connectivity in the brain. Part three provides an overview of the analysis techniques currently available and highlights new developments. Part four introduces the application and translation of the concepts of brain connectivity to behavior, cognition and the clinical domain.

Neurowissenschaftler suchen nach Antworten auf die Fragen, wie wir lernen und Information speichern, welche Prozesse im Gehirn verantwortlich sind und in welchem Zeitrahmen diese ablaufen. Die Konzepte, die aus der Physik kommen und weiterentwickelt werden, können in Medizin und Soziologie, aber auch in Robotik und Bildanalyse Anwendung finden. Zentrales Thema dieses Buches sind die sogenannten kritischen Phänomene im Gehirn. Diese werden mithilfe mathematischer und physikalischer Modelle beschrieben, mit denen man auch Erdbeben, Waldbrände oder die Ausbreitung von Epidemien modellieren kann. Neuere Erkenntnisse haben ergeben, dass diese selbstgeordneten Instabilitäten auch im Nervensystem auftreten. Dieses Referenzwerk stellt theoretische und experimentelle Befunde internationaler Gehirnforschung vor zeichnet die Perspektiven dieses neuen Forschungsfeldes auf.

Download PDF Download EPUB The deterioration of skeletal muscle performance (e.g., declines in muscle strength and motor performance) with advancing age has long been anecdotally recognized as Shakespeare pointed out nearly a half millennium ago in his monologue The Seven Ages of Man, and has been of scientific interest for well over a century. Over the past several decades the scientific and medical communities have recognized that reduced skeletal muscle performance is a debilitating and life threatening condition in the elderly. For example, the age-associated loss of muscle strength, as well as impairment in the ability to finely control movement, is highly associated with physical disability and difficulty performing activities of daily living. While the nervous system is widely recognized for its role in controlling skeletal muscle during motor function, its role in determining the performance characteristics of aged skeletal muscle has largely been understudied. Historically, it was believed that these reductions in muscle performance were primarily resultant of age-associated adaptations in skeletal muscle (e.g., muscle atrophy). However, aging is associated with widespread qualitative and quantitative changes in both the central and peripheral nervous systems that are likely to influence numerous aspects of muscle performance, such as muscle strength, fatigue, and motor control, as well as mobility. In this research topic, we sought to examine a broad range of issues surrounding: 1) the age-related changes in nervous system anatomical, physiological, and biochemical changes in the central and/or peripheral nervous systems; 2) the functional role of these nervous system changes in contributing to altered skeletal muscle performance and/or mobility; and 3) physical and pharmacologic interventions that act via the nervous system to enhance muscle performance and/or mobility. Researchers and academicians engaged in aging, neuroscience, and/or applied physiology research focused within the scope of this research topic, were encouraged to contribute an original research article, review article, clinical case study, hypothesis and theory article, method article, opinion article, or technology report to this research topic. Herein, we present a series of outstanding articles within this scope of work, including a last minute addition article from Wiesmeier, Dalin and Maurer that is not mentioned in the editorial, that we hope will help to vertically advance the intersecting fields of aging/geriatrics and neuroscience. Lastly, as the editors, we wish to thank all article contributors and peer reviewers for their efforts in contributing to this Research Topic journal issue/book. Additionally, we would like to thank people everywhere who volunteer their time and body for human subjects research studies, such that are presented herein. It is the wonderful individuals who are willing to participate in experiments that make scientific exploration and health and medical advancements possible.