Transient Induced Global Response Synchronization

Synchronization has a long history in physics where it refers to the phase locking of identical oscillators. This notion has been applied in biology to such widely varying phenomena as the flashing of fireflies and the binding problem in the brain. The relationship between neural activity and the behaviour of the organism is complex and still poorly understood. There have been attempts to explain this using the notion of synchronization, but the participating neurons are fungible, their activity transient and stochastic, and their dynamics highly variable. In spite of this, the behaviour of the organism may be quite robust. The phenomenon of transient induced global response synchronization (TIGoRS) has been used to explain the emergence of stable responses at the global level in spite of marked variability at the local level. TIGoRS is present when an external stimulus to a complex system causes the system’s responses to cluster closely in state space. In some models, a 10% input sample can result in a concordance of outputs of more than 90%. This occurs even though the underlying system dynamics is time varying and inhomogeneous across the system. Previous work has shown that TIGoRS is a ubiquitous phenomenon among complex systems. The ability of complex systems exhibiting TIGoRS to stably parse environmental transients into salient units to which they stably respond led to the notion of Sulis machines which emergently generate a primitive linguistic structure through their dynamics. This paper reviews the notion of TIGoRS and its expression in several complex systems models including driven cellular automata, cocktail party and dispositional cellular automata.