J. A. Scott Kelso

J. A. Scott Kelso (born February 27, 1947 in Derry, Northern Ireland) is an Irish born neuroscientist working at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Kelso holds the Glenwood and Martha Creech Eminent Scholar Chair in Science at (FAU). In 1985 he founded the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences [1], an explicitly interdisciplinary academic and research unit that includes neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists and computer scientists working together on common problems housed in the same physical facility. Kelso led the Center until 2005 when he stepped down to focus on his own research. Kelso is also Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences, and Biomedical Sciences and is Program Director of the National Institute of Mental Health’s National Training Program in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at FAU, a graduate education program aimed at training theoretically and computationally-grounded neuroscientists who can utilize the concepts, methods, and tools of complex systems in the experimental laboratory.

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Education and awards

Professor Kelso received his undergraduate education at Stranmillis University College Belfast (1965-1969) and the University of Calgary, Alberta (1971-1972). He graduated with the Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1975. From 1976 to 1978 Kelso was Assistant Professor and Director of The Motor Behavior Laboratory at the University of Iowa. Between 1978 and 1985 he was Senior Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut and Professor of Psychology and Biobehavioral Sciences (Unit of Behavioral Genetics) at the University of Connecticut. In 1995, he co-directed the Summer School in Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute, and has held various visiting professorships in France, Germany, and Russia. Kelso has lectured at home and abroad, including The Brain Bursary Lectures in London, The Centennial Lecture at the University of Tokyo, The Distinguished Lecture Series at the International School for Computable Economics in Trento, Italy, the Smithsonian Institution Lecture in Washington, D.C. and most recently the Jane Goodall Lecture in Portland, Oregon in 2004 and the F.J. McGuigan Prize Lecture for Understanding the Mind at the 2005 American Psychological Association Convention.

Kelso has published over 300 research articles in major neuroscience, psychology, and physics journals, as well as many book chapters, including editing or authoring 8 books. He is serving or has served on nine Editorial Boards, has reviewed for numerous funding agencies in the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia and is the Executive Editor of the Springer Series on Understanding Complex Systems. He served as President of the South Florida Chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society from 1995-1999, and is a Member of the Scientific Board of the Plexus Institute. He is the recipient of many awards including the Distinguished Scholar Scientist Award from the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity (1999) the Senior Scientist and MERIT Awards from the National Institutes of Health (1997) and the Distinguished Alumni Research Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1990). He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (1986), American Psychological Society (1990), American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004) and the recipient (2001) of a Docteur Honoris Causa Degree from the Republic of France and the University of Toulouse (Paul Sabatier).

Research

Kelso's longstanding goal is to understand how human beings (and human brains)—singly and together—coordinate behavior. The hypothesis that guides his 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. Kelso and his dedicated team of researchers use the latest non-invasive neuroimaging 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. Over the last 25 years or so, along with colleagues working in laboratories around the world, he has been at the forefront of developing a multilevel, interdisciplinary science of coordination called coordination dynamics. Coordination dynamics is an overarching conceptual framework that describes, explains and predicts how patterns of coordination form, persist, and change in different kinds of systems and at different levels of analysis.

Kelso is probably best known for his famous bimanual phase transition experiments in humans, first reported in 1981, showing that the coordinated behavior of highly complex living systems (viz. human beings) is a self-organized process governed by low-dimensional nonlinear dynamical laws. This work is said to have caused a "paradigm shift" because it changed the way scientists in many fields thought about the organization of behavior. Up until Kelso's research, a dominant view was that behavior was determined by a "central program", a prearranged set of instructions that prescribed how the components should behave. Self-organization, on the other hand, is the process through which dynamic patterns of behavior emerge as a result of nonlinear interactions among very large numbers of heterogeneously connected coordinating elements. The so-called HKB model that Kelso developed in collaboration with the theoretical physicist Hermann Haken ('the father of laser theory') derived the basic forms of coordination observed in his experiments 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 a review of this early work see Schöner & Kelso, Science, 239, 1513-1520, 1988 or Kelso, et al., Physica Scripta, 35, 79-87, 1987). Later extensions of HKB accommodated the effects of noise, broken symmetry, multiple interacting heterogeneous components, recruitment~annihilation processes, parametric stabilization, the role of changing environments on coordination and so forth.

Although grounded in the concepts of self-organization and mathematical tools of coupled nonlinear dynamical systems (see synergetics), coordination dynamics specifically incorporates essential informational aspects of human cognitive, brain, and social function, including anticipation, intention, attention, and learning. Kelso's main thesis is that the real-life coordination of neurons in the brain and the real-life coordinated actions of people and animals are linked by virtue of sharing a common coordination dynamics. That is, brain, mind and behavior appear to be cut from the same dynamic cloth. Remarkable support for this thesis comes from experiments by Kelso and colleagues using large scale SQUID arrays (MEG) to record the neuromagnetic activity of the brain. Kelso et al (e.g., Phys Letts A, 169, 132-144, 1992) demonstrated dramatic phase transitions in the sensorimotor cortex indicating that the brain itself is a complex, self-organizing, dynamical system living on the brink of instability. In recent years, Kelso has been credited with the discovery of a new principle of brain functioning called metastability in which the individual parts of the brain exhibit transient tendencies to function autonomously at the same time as they exhibit tendencies to coordinate together (see e.g. Finglekurts & Fingelkurts, Int. J Neurosci., 114, 843-862, 2004).

Kelso’s current work focuses on how the brain--by using this subtle blend of integration among, and segregation between its functioning parts--creates meaningful information that may then be stabilized over time and used to direct the ongoing activity of the organism. His latest research in the Human Brain and Behavior Laboratory (HBBL) with Drs. Emmanuelle Tognoli, Julien Lagarde and Gonzalo DeGuzman is showing, using a novel technology to record neuroelectric activity from two brains at the same time, how the same principles of coordination dynamics apply also to human brains working together in social settings.

In an attempt to step back, understand and interpret what the sum total of his life's research might be saying and where it might be leading, Kelso, along with co-author David A. Engstrøm have recently written The Complementary Nature. In this book, Kelso and Engstrøm contend that ubiquitous contraries are complementary and propose a comprehensive, empirically-based scientific theory of how the polarized world and the world in between can be reconciled. They nominate the tilde, or squiggle (~), as the symbolic punctuation for reconciled complementary pairs. The book reconciles "the philosophy of complementary pairs" with the science of coordination dynamics.

As mentioned above, experiments and theory show that the human brain is capable of displaying two apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive behaviors--integration and segregation--at the same time. Coordination dynamics--a mathematically expressed theory that reconciles the scientific language of "states" with the novel dynamical language of "tendencies"--attests to the complementary nature inherent in human brains and behavior. It may explain, Kelso and Engstrøm argue, why we (and nature) appear to partition things, events, and ideas into pairs. This account is not just metaphorical; the reconciliations they describe are grounded in the principles and mathematical language of the theory of coordination dynamics. The Complementary Nature provides a clear-cut methodology for this evolving theory of brain and behavior that can also be applied to areas and developments outside the neurosciences, hence aiding reconciliations within and between disparate fields.

Books

• Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behaviour, MIT Press (1995)
• Coordination Dynamics: Issues and Trends, Springer (2004)
• The Complementary Nature, MIT Press (2006)