The Significance of "Advanced" and "Retarded" signals for a Transactional Interpretation of Ideomotor Action Control and Inter-Hemispheric Cortical Synchronisation

Ideomotor theory explains developmental and executive aspects of action control departing from the proposition that actually ongoing behaviour is sensorily guided by the anticipated consequences of its own future effects. The present paper discusses a view which is rooted, in opposition to the "computing" approach of the AI tradition, rather in the "tuning" view of J.J. Gibson and his followers, departing from the framework of a transactional interpretation of quantum brain dynamics. Based on the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, this approach accounts for advanced/retarded anomalous resonance coupling in brain dynamics in analogy to quantum entanglement effects between distant twin particles (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradoxes, quantum non-locality, teleportation). Beyond the quantum mechanical micro scale, indices for similar absorber site driven resonance coupling effects have probably been found at the cosmological macro level too, namely, by the soviet astronomers Kosyrev and Nasonov. Hypothetically, their observations might be explained by a mechanism of anticipative resonance coupling with the advanced future positions of stellar objects expanding to the same time scale as their gravitational forces are retarded due to the limitations of light speed. As has been shown by Dubois, anticipation is needed in macro- and micro-cosmological feed-back loops in order to avoid entrainment towards a chaotic attractor. This argument seems applicable to an advanced resonance coupling solution for cortical synchronisation and ideomotor action control too. Neuronal loops are fed into a network of socalled synfire chains, the timing of which is critically dependent on anticipatory predictions of the next input in order to adjust their output in a way which stabilises nonlinear brain dynamics. In order to get a synchronous visual flow in both left and right brain hemispheres, as is needed in order to account for the coherence of micro timing in binocular stereo vision, the temporally delayed information of the left and right eyes' visual hemifields, which are initially processed in different hemispheres, should be integated with anticipated versions of their complements in order to close the time gap. From this point of view, popular experimental data, e.g. about iconic memory, backward masking and the Libet experiments under actual discussion, may be reinterpreted in line with the hypothesis of an absorber theory for quantum brain dynamics.