Synergies appear in many contexts on many levels of biological organization, from the genetic to the social.Īlthough the concept of synergy has a long and cherished history in physiology and medicine (e.g., Bernstein, 1967 Edelman, 1987 Easton, 1972 Gelfand, et al., 1971 Gelfand & Latash, 1998 Kelso, 1995 Latash & Turvey, 1996 Sherrington, 1906 Turvey, 1977), the significance of synergies has been underappreciated for a number of reasons. The synergy hypothesis (Kelso, 1995 in press) is therefore a hypothesis about Nature’s way to handle biological complexity. Just as new states of matter form under certain conditions when a group of atoms behaves as a single particle (the Bose-Einstein condensate) so a new state of biological function emerges when ensembles of different elements form a synergy. neurons, muscles, joints) that are temporarily constrained to act as a single coherent unit. An attractive hypothesis is that in such complex living systems the elements are organized into synergies (also known as coordinative structures) defined as functional groupings of structural elements (e.g. Thus, any ordinary human activity requires the cooperation among very many structurally diverse elements. What, he asked, are the principles of organization in complex biological systems that contain enormous numbers of different components? Notwithstanding a nervous system that contains ~10 12 neurons and neuronal connections, the human body alone consists of over 790 muscles and 100 joints.
John von Neumann, the father of the digital computer, once remarked that the problem of understanding the central nervous system is not how it effects one particular thing, but rather how it does all the things that it does in their full complexity.
Scott Kelso, Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida