Toward a Complementary Neuroscience: Metastable Coordination Dynamics of the Brain

Metastability has been proposed as a new principle of behavioral and brain function and may point the way to a truly complementary neuroscience. From elementary coordination dynamics we show explicitly that metastability is a result of a symmetry breaking caused by the subtle interplay of two forces: the tendency of the components to couple together and the tendency of the components to express their intrinsic independent behavior. The metastable regime reconciles the well-known tendencies of specialized brain regions to express their autonomy (segregation) and the tendencies for those regions to work together as a synergy (integration). Integration ~ segregation is just one of the complementary pairs (denoted by the tilde (~) symbol) to emerge from the science of coordination dynamics. We discuss metastability in the brain by describing the favorable conditions existing for its emergence and by deriving some predictions for its empirical characterization in neurophysiological recordings.