Connecting Cortical and Behavioral Dynamics: Bimanual Coordination

For the paradigmatic case of bimanual coordination, we review levels of organization of behavioral dynamics and present a description in terms of modes of behavior. We briefly review a recently developed model of spatiotemporal brain activity that is based on short-and long-range connectivity of neural ensembles. This model is specified for the case of motor and sensorimotor units embedded in the neural sheet. Focusing on the cortical left-right symmetry, we derive a bimodal description of the brain activity that is connected to behavioral dynamics. We make predictions of global features of brain dynamics during coordination tasks and test these against experimental magnetoencephalogram (MEG) results. A key feature of our approach is that phenomenological laws at the behavioral level can be connected to a field-theoretical description of cortical dynamics.