Trends

Over the past 30 years, higher-order principles of self-organizing dynamical systems have influenced our understanding of brain, cognition, and behavior.

They might also offer insights into age-old puzzles about the origins of agency and directedness in living things.

Experiments and observations of human infants combined with theoretical modeling suggest that the birth of agency corresponds to a eureka-like phase transition in a coupled dynamical system whose key variables span the interaction between the baby and its environment.

Analysis shows that the main mechanism underlying the emergence of agency is autocatalytic and involves positive feedback.

When the baby's initially spontaneous movements cause the world to change, their perceived consequences have a sudden and sustained amplifying effect on the baby's further actions. The prelinguistic baby realizes it can make things happen!