A Dynamical Basis for Action Systems

Students of the neural basis of cognition might weil take as their dictum the first phrase in the gospel according to St. John: “In the beginning was the word.” In this chapter, we beg to differ and side instead with Goethe’s Faust who, not satisfied with the accuracy of the biblical statement, proposed a rather different solution: “Im Anfang war die Tat”—“In the beginning was the act.”1 Certainly, if there is a lesson to be learned from the fie1d of neuroembryology, it is that motility precedes reactivity; there is a chronological primacy of the motor over the sensory. 2 Although one of our main premises is that any distinction between sensory and motor is an artificiaI one (cf. Kelso, 1979), this brief sojoum into developmental embryology affords what we take to be a main contrast between the topic of concem in this chapter—the control and coordination of movement—and the subject matter of the rest of this book.