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Walter Freeman's work emphasises the role of individual activity and intentionality as opposed to the traditional stimulus-reaction view and the machine metaphor. The results of our computer modeling studies suggest the nonlinear dynamics of experience emerging from perception-action cycles. We consider the perception-action cycle as a behavioral continuum of anticipated outcomes of actions. Neuroscientific research shows that each behavioral act is based on the activity of behaviorally specialized neurons distributed across the brain. Active learning during individual development leads to an increasing differentiation of the structure of individual experience through the formation of such groups of behaviorally specialized neurons. We consider the differentiation of individual experience as a nonlinear process which is implemented at different levels, and argue that consciousness and emotion can be described as dynamic characteristics prominent at the most and least differentiated systemic levels, correspondingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cardiac activity is involved in the processes of organization of goal-directed behaviour. Each behavioural act is aimed at achieving an adaptive outcome and it is subserved by the actualization of functional systems consisting of elements distributed across the brain and the rest of the body. This paper proposes a system-evolutionary view on the activity of the heart and its variability. We have compared the irregularity of the heart rate, as measured by sample entropy (SampEn), in behaviours that are subserved by functional systems formed at different stages of individual development, which implement organism-environment interactions with different degrees of differentiation. The results have shown that SampEn of the heart rate was higher during performing tasks that included later acquired knowledge (foreign language vs. native language; mathematical vocabulary vs. general vocabulary) and decreased in the stress and alcohol conditions, as well as at the beginning of learning. These results are in line with the hypothesis that irregularity of the heart rate reflects the properties of a set of functional systems subserving current behaviour, with higher irregularity corresponding to later acquired and more complex behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]