Turing's cascade instability supports the coordination of the mind, brain, and behavior
This work addresses the need for a unified theoretical framework in cognitive and behavioral sciences, offering a novel perspective that could shift paradigms, though it is primarily a review and thus incremental in nature.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating mind, brain, and behavior by proposing Turing's cascade instability as an alternative to the computer metaphor, reviewing evidence from executive functioning, postural control, and neuronal avalanches to support this framework.
Turing inspired a computer metaphor of the mind and brain that has been handy and has spawned decades of empirical investigation, but he did much more and offered behavioral and cognitive sciences another metaphor--that of the cascade. The time has come to confront Turing's cascading instability, which suggests a geometrical framework driven by power laws and can be studied using multifractal formalism and multiscale probability density function analysis. Here, we review a rapidly growing body of scientific investigations revealing signatures of cascade instability and their consequences for a perceiving, acting, and thinking organism. We review work related to executive functioning (planning to act), postural control (bodily poise for turning plans into action), and effortful perception (action to gather information in a single modality and action to blend multimodal information). We also review findings on neuronal avalanches in the brain, specifically about neural participation in body-wide cascades. Turing's cascade instability blends the mind, brain, and behavior across space and time scales and provides an alternative to the dominant computer metaphor.