Ambiguity in Mind and Nature is the result of cognitive multistability, the phenomenon in which an unchanging stimulus, usually visual, gives rise in the subject to an oscillating perceptual interpretation. The vase/face picture is one of the most famous examples.
In this book scientists from many disciplines including physics, biology, psychology, maths and computer science, present recent progress in this fascinating area of cognitive science. Using the phenomenon of multistability as a paradigm they seek to understand how meaning originates in the brain as a consequence of...

This book gives an introduction to the mathematical theory of cooperative behavior in active systems of various origins, both natural and artificial. It is based on a lecture course in synergetics which I held for almost ten years at the University of Moscow. The first volume deals mainly with the problems of pattern fonnation and the properties of self-organized regular patterns in distributed active systems. It also contains a discussion of distributed analog information processing which is based on the cooperative dynamics of active systems. The second volume is devoted to the stochastic...

The development of a proper description of the living world today stands as one of the most significant challenges to physics. A variety of new experimental techniques in molecular biology, microbiol- ogy, physiology and other fields of biological research constantly expand our knowledge and enable us to make increasingly more detailed functional and structural descriptions. Over the past decades, the amount and complexity of available information have multiplied dramatically, while at the same time our basic understanding of the nature of regulation, behavior, morphogenesis and evolution in...

The second edition of this volume has been extensively revised. A different version of Chap. 7, reflecting recent significant progress in understanding of spatiotempo- ral chaos, is now provided. Much new material has been included in the sections dealing with intermittency in birth-death models and noise-induced phase transi- tions. A new section on control of chaotic behavior has been added to Chap. 6. The subtitle of the volume has been changed to better reflect its contents. We acknowledge stimulating discussions with H. Haken and E. Scholl and are grateful to our colleagues M. Bar, D....

This book was originally conceived as a continuation in theme of the collec tive monograph Limits of Predictability (Yu. A. Kravtsov, Ed., Springer Series in Synergetics, Vol. 60, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1993). The main thrust of that book was to examine the various effects and factors (system non stationarity, measurement noise, predictive model accuracy, and so on) that may limit, in a fundamental fashion, our ability to mathematically predict physical and man-made phenomena and events. Particularly interesting was the diversity of fields from which the papers and examples were drawn,...

An international conference. titled Nonlinear Phenomena in Chemical Dynamics was held in Bordeaux on September 7-11, 1981. The present volume contains the text of lectures and abstracts of posters presented during the meeting. This conference is part of a series of scientific multidisciplinary meetings in which chemistry is involved at various levels. Amongst the most recent ones let us mention Aachen 1979, Bielefeld 1979, New York 1979, Elmau 1981. In addition, this meeting is a direct extension of the first one that took place in Bordeaux in 1978 on the topic "Far from equilibrium:...

While the volumes hitherto published in the Springer Series in Synergetics have been devoted almost exclusively to the self-organized formation of structures in physics, chemistry and biology, the present monograph by Weidlich and Haag deals with the formation of "structures" (or "patterns") in society. At first glance it would seem a daring enterprise to deal with the complex processes in society using concepts and methods first developed in physics. But over the past decade it has been shown that there is a large class of phenomena in a variety of fields to which unifying concepts can be...

For a long time, immunology has been dominated by the idea of a simple linear cause-effect relationship between the exposure to an antigen and the production of specific antibodies against that antigen. Clonal selection was the name of the theory based on this idea and it has provided the main concepts to account for the known features of the immune response. More recently, immunologists have discovered a wealth of new facts, in the form of different regulatory cells (helpers, suppressors, antigen presenting cells), genetic determinations of immune responses such as those involved in graft...

Any description of the workings of nature by means of measurements and ob- servations is beset with the problem of how to cope with an immense amount of information. In physics, it is an established approach to derive basic equations which then serve as cornerstones of what is called a theory of the phenomena. This derivation is based on certain characteristics of the phenomena, the refine- ment of which results from a reduction of the amount of empirical information, with the reduction leading to an enhancement of the very characteristics that are sought for in the otherwise seemingly...

This textbook is based on a lecture course in synergetics given at the University of Moscow. In this second of two volumes, we discuss the emergence and properties of complex chaotic patterns in distributed active systems. Such patterns can be produced autonomously by a system, or can result from selective amplification of fluctuations caused by external weak noise. Although the material in this book is often described by refined mathematical theories, we have tried to avoid a formal mathematical style. Instead of rigorous proofs, the reader will usually be offered only "demonstrations" (the...