Chaotic itinerancy and its roles in cognitive neurodynamics

- Chaotic itinerancy describes cortical state transitions via neutral stability.
- Chaotic itinerancy accelerates a hierarchical organization of memory space.
- Chaotic itinerancy conveys information between communicating people.
- Learning the meaning of symbols may necessitate chaotic itinerancy via critical states.

Chaotic itinerancy is an autonomously excited trajectory through high-dimensional state space of cortical neural activity that causes the appearance of a temporal sequence of quasi-attractors. A quasi-attractor is a local region of weakly convergent flows that represent ordered activity, yet connected to divergent flows representing disordered, chaotic activity between the regions. In a cognitive neurodynamic aspect, quasi-attractors represent perceptions, thoughts and memories, chaotic trajectories between them with intelligent searches, such as history-dependent trial-and-error via exploration, and itinerancy with history-dependent sequences in thinking, speaking and writing.