Haskins Publications

Number	506
Year
Drawer	9
Entry Date	11/19/1999
Authors	Kelso, J. A. S. & Scholz, J. P.
Contact
Publication	In H. Haken (Ed.), Synergetics of Complex Systems in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Springer-Verlag.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0506.pdf
Abstract	[Introduction] The production of a “simple” utterance, such as the syllable /ba/, involves the cooperation of a large number of neuromuscular elements operating on different time scales, e.g., at respiratory, laryngeal, and supralaryngeal levels. Yet somehow, from this huge dimensionality, /ba/ emerges as a coherent and well-formed pattern. Similarly, were one to count the neurons, muscles, and joints that cooperate to produce the “simple” act of walking, literally thousands of degrees of freedom would be involved. Yet again, somehow walking emerges as a fundamentally low-dimensional system, described by a complicated set of partial, nonlinear differential equations can be reduced--when probed experimentally or analyzed theoretically--to a low-dimensional description [1,2]. In all these cases, it seems, information about the system is compressed--from a microscopic basis of huge dimensionality--to a macroscopic basis of low dimensionality.
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