Synergetics of the brain
Hermann HAken
Center of Synergetics, Institute for Theoretical Physics 1,
University of Stuttgart,
Pfaffenwaldring 57, 70550 Stuttgart,
Germany
Abstract:
In the human brain billions of neurons cooperate to enable us to move, to
recognize patters, to produce speech, to think, etc. Who or what steers the
cooperation of the neurons? Sometime ago, I suggested that the brain is a
synergetics, i.e., self-organizing systems that may spontaneously produce
spatio-temporal patters of neuronal activity.
I first re-call by now well-known concepts that allow us to deal with
self-organizing systems, e.g., contron parameters, instability, order
parameters and the slaving principle.
By means of the analysis of experimental data on movement coordination,
visual perception, electro- and magnetoencephalograms it is shown how
these concepts can be applied.
In particular, it is shown how the complex dynamics can, in a number of
well-defined cases, be reduced to low-dimensional dynamics that govern
the behavior of the many individual neurons.