Over the past ten years or so, the language of dynamic systems has become increasingly important for understanding cognitive and neural processes, both in the moment and over development (e.g. Kelso 1995; Port and van Gelder 1995; Skarda and Freeman 1987; Thatcher 1998; Thelen and Smith 1994; Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991). According to the dynamic systems (DS) approach, cognition builds on itself, biasing its own outcomes and growing in coherence and complexity. This process is often called self-organization, defined as the emergence of novel structures or levels of organization resulting from the spontaneous synchronization of lower-order elements. At the psychological level of description, self-organizing cognitive wholes emerge from the synchronization of lower-order components, such as associations, expectancies, propositions, percepts, schemas and memories. At the biological level, these abstract entities are translated into populations of neurones and neural assemblies that become rapidly synchronized through electrochemical activities.

There is growing evidence that coherent mental events correspond with neural self-organization, both emerging from and constraining the synchronization of cellular events in the physical system of the brain (Engel, Fries and Singer 2001; Thompson and Varela 2001). This is a momentous discovery that promises to resolve the mind–body problem in a way never before possible. On this view, it appears that mind grows out of matter – specifically, brain matter – in a dynamic process that organizes the very matter from which it arises. The question I wish to address in this chapter is: how does emotion contribute to this process?