Putting reins on the brain. How the body and environment use it.
Frontiers in human neuroscience January 1, 2014 Dobromir G Dotov 23 citations
A radical embodied cognitive neuroscience (RECN) that treats the central nervous system as a nonlinear dynamical system must reconcile with existing neurodynamic approaches. The paper reviews how the brain and behavior are linked through circular causality and criticizes three current methods for linking dynamics to brain function. It proposes that studying brain self-organization without considering ecological embedding is insufficient. The authors argue the central nervous system has two roles: being easily enslaved by behavioral patterns that guide an animal through its environment, and flexibly switching among patterns via a metastable circuit breaker. Motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease, explained as excessive stability of this circuit breaker, support the idea.