His experimental research in the late 1970s and early 1980s led to the HKB model (Haken–Kelso–Bunz),[1] a mathematical formulation that quantitatively describes and predicts how elementary forms of coordinated behavior arise and change adaptively as a result of nonlinear interactions among components.
In 1985 he founded the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, an interdisciplinary research center that includes neuroscientists, applied mathematicians, physicists, psychologists and computer scientists housed in the same physical facility, working together on common problems of complex, biological systems ranging from molecules to minds.
But coordination dynamics seeks to model specific properties of human cognition, neurophysiology, and social function – such as anticipation, intention, attention, decision-making and learning.
Along with work conducted by Polit and Bizzi on monkeys at MIT[8] Kelso's research was a key to helping establish the equilibrium point theory of motor control originally postulated by Anatol Feldman.
[9] Then, working with his students David Goodman and Dan Southard he demonstrated—using a pulsed light emitting diode technique long before the age of sophisticated computer assisted motion analysis—that the brain controls the complex, coordinated movements of the upper limbs by exploiting functional synergies, a notion originally put forth by the Russian physiologist and cybernetician Nicolai Bernstein.
[11] In asking how synergies might be formed in motor systems Kelso turned from Sherringtonian neurophysiology to theories of self-organization in particular the fledgling interdisciplinary field of synergetics founded by Hermann Haken.
In contrast, Kelso showed experimentally that behavior can also emerge in a self-organizing way, as a result of highly nonlinear interactions among many interconnected elements.
Phase transitions are a basic mechanism of self-organization in nature and Kelso's experiments, which have been replicated many times, were the first to show them in the coordinated movements of human beings.
"[18] For example, on the basis of recordings and analysis of human brain activity[19] Viktor Jirsa and Armin Fuchs along with Kelso were able to derive the HKB equations of coordination at the behavioral level from a more realistic anatomical and physiological model of the underlying neural substrate[20] Kelso's current work focuses on whether the same principles and mechanisms of coordination dynamics apply also to human brains working together in social settings.
Using large electrode arrays now available in the field of electroencephalography (EEG), he and his co-workers have been imaging the brains of pairs of humans, as they perform coordinated hand movements.
The book is written for the general reader, and uses simple experimental examples and illustrations to convey essential concepts, strategies, and methods, with a minimum of mathematics.
[citation needed] Kelso's second full-length book, written with his former postdoc David A. Engstrøm, is The Complementary Nature (MIT Press, 2006).
The essence of the theory is that the human brain is capable of displaying two apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive behaviors – integration and segregation – at the same time.
The squiggle exposes a basic truth: both complementary aspects and their dynamics are needed for an exhaustive description and understanding of the complex phenomena and systems in life, mind, society and nature.