The Human Brain and Behavior Laboratory

The human brain is a complex system, possessing more than a trillion cells many of which have more than a thousand connections. Out of this enormous complexity, patterns of cognition, emotion and behavior somehow emerge. What laws, principles and mechanisms make this possible? How does the human brain really work? What is its relation to what people do? What happens when the brain does not work, as in the many brain disorders that afflict our society? How do human brains work together?

These are the burning questions that drive research in the Human Brain and Behavior Laboratory (HBBL). Using new concepts, strategies and methods for investigating complex systems and the latest technologies for imaging the human brain, our dedicated team of researchers at HBBL is unraveling the secrets of how the human brain works and its relationship to mind and behavior. In the last 20 years at FAU we have already accomplished a lot, and are poised to achieve much more.

  J.A. Scott Kelso

Over the last 25 years or so, due to the efforts of people working in many fields, a multilevel, transdisciplinary science of coordination has emerged called coordination dynamics . Scientists in the brain and cognitive sciences (neuroscience), the social, behavioral and economic sciences, developmental biology, and even molecular biology have embraced some of the central ideas of coordination dynamics and are now elaborating them both conceptually and empirically.

At HBBL, Coordination Dynamics has evolved in four overlapping and still developing phases. The first phase stems from the original work of Scott Kelso and the theoretical physicist Hermann Haken ('the father of laser theory') at The University of Stuttgart in Germany . In this research, the coordinated behavior of highly complex systems (human beings)-- rather than being prescribed by a central "program" -- was shown to emerge as a result of self-organizing dynamical processes. Self-organization is the term science uses to describe how dynamic patterns of behavior emerge as a consequence of interactions among very large numbers of individual coordinating elements. The so-called HKB model derived basic forms of coordination from nonlinear interactions among the individual coordinating elements, and quantitatively predicted effects, such as critical slowing down and enhanced fluctuations associated with dramatic changes in coordination that were demonstrated in detailed experiments (for review see Schöner & Kelso, Science , 239, 1513-1520). Later extensions of HKB accommodated the effects of noise, broken symmetry, multiple interacting heterogeneous components, recruitment~annihilation processes, the role of changing environments on coordination and so forth.

Using this initial work as a foundation, the second phase investigates how human beings attend, perceive, decide, act, learn and remember--so-called cognitive coordination dynamics . For example, it has been shown that cognitive and environmental information may stabilize or destabilize patterns of coordination depending on context. Likewise, the amount of attention devoted to a task influences and is influenced by the stability of coordination. Human learning and development have been shown to depend on a person's "intrinsic dynamics", which reflect the individual learner's prior history and his or her potential for acquiring new knowledge. Learning and development thus proceed in the context of preexisting capacities and predispositions that are unique to the individual. How new information cooperates or competes with an individual's intrinsic dynamics has been shown to determine whether learning is slow or rapid.

Beginning in the late 80's and extending to the present time, a third phase uses the latest imaging technologies--large scale electrode arrays (EEG) and SQuID sensors (MEG) along with real-time fMRI-- to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of the human brain—how areas of the brain are selectively recruited and disengaged on a millisecond by millisecond basis to accomplish cognitive tasks (Kelso et al., 1992; Kelso et al., 1998). Here the goal is to elucidate the brain~behavior relation by explicitly connecting brain and behavioral levels of description. Theoretical modeling deals with ensembles of excitatory and inhibitory neurons that compose different functional units in the brain, and the intra- and inter-cortical connections from which behavior and cognition may be seen to emerge (see, e.g. Jirsa, Fuchs & Kelso, Neural Computation , 10, 2019-2045; Fuchs, Jirsa & Kelso, Neuroimage , 11, 359-369).

A fourth and ongoing phase of our research program is studying how brains work together - interpersonal or social coordination dynamics . This work is aimed at understanding how social interactions are mediated by networks of neurons and neural circuitry within and between human beings. Such work is likely to be crucial for a deeper understanding of autism and other disturbances of social interaction.

Relatedly, in order to cross the divide between basic research and clinical practice, ongoing clinical research studies at HBBL done in collaboration with our private partner, University MRI, include mapping the recovery of function in the brain following stroke, assessing timing deficits in the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease, prospective fMRI studies of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, the potentially beneficial effects of music on the brain.

In coordination dynamics, the real-life coordination of neurons in the brain and the real-life coordinated actions of animals are cut, fundamentally, from the same dynamic cloth. Integrity is in turn preserved because it is never threatened. Psychophysical unity is undergirded at all levels by coordination dynamics

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2004)

The hypothesis that guides our research is that it is the coordination among specialized regions of the brain that underlies human emotions and our ability to attend, perceive, think, learn, remember, decide and act. What is the nature of this coordination and how is it to be understood? To answer this question experimental data are garnered at several levels of complexity and a theoretical framework directs experimental research. We use the latest non-invasive brain imaging technologies (EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET, etc) and sophisticated behavioral analysis tools to gather information about the structure and function of the brain during real-time behavior. Our main thesis is that brain, mind and behavior are linked by virtue of sharing a common underlying coordination dynamics. Coordination dynamics seeks the laws, principles and mechanisms underlying the coordinated behavior of different kinds of components at multiple levels of description (molecules, cells, circuits, etc). It is an overarching conceptual framework that describes, explains and predicts how patterns of coordination form and change at multiple levels of brain and behavior. New research at HBBL is showing how the same principles of coordination dynamics apply also to human brains working together in social settings.