Coordination comes in many guises and represents one of the most striking, but least understood features of living things. It achieves its pinnacle in the vast array of cells and connections called the human brain, and in the collection of human beings we call society. How coordination forms and changes in such complex systems -- from genes to cells to neural ensembles to cognition and behavior -- is of great interest to many disciplines, particularly neuroscience, psychology, biology and physics. Numerous mental and physical 'disorders' are likely to reflect breakdowns in coordination at the neural level. Understanding coordination is likely to have a major impact on treating disorders of many kinds. Over the last 20 years or so a new foundation for understanding coordination has emerged called coordination dynamics (equations of motion whose parameters alter the stability and change of coordination patterns over time along with the nonlinear coupling among components that gives rise to them). A central problem of coordination dynamics is how to identify the key variables of coordination (defined as a functional ordering among interacting components in space and time) and their dynamics (rules that govern the stability and change of coordination patterns) on multiple levels of description, and for different behavioral and cognitive functions.

Research done at the Center and around the world has established the idea that basic forms of coordination emerge, not because of a special coordinating agent, but rather as a result of the system's ability to organize itself when intentionally coupled to its environment. These facts combined with predictive mathematical models provide a new foundation for understanding coordinated behavior grounded in the concepts of self-organization and the tools of nonlinear dynamics appropriately tailored to handle the informational (e.g. perceptual, cognitive, affective) aspects of human behavior. At the Center, much emphasis is placed on embedding the concepts and tools of coordination dynamics in the context of particular experimental model systems, thereby establishing a theory-experiment relation.