Over the past several decades, the sciences have witnessed a significant paradigm shift. Our traditional notions of order, energy, causality and methodology have all been upended. A new set of views has arisen that enables us to better understand and examine the complexity of nature. In this perspective, behavior is nonlinear, order emerges spontaneously and responses are best understood as the movement of trajectories through multi-dimensional space. This book examines the role that dynamical systems, complexity science, networks, and fractals play in helping to explain the most difficult thing of all: ourselves.

While so many researchers in dynamical cognition are busy writing books that describe theirs and related research in deliciously excruciating detail in books that are perfect for graduate courses, no one seems to be writing novice-friendly introductory dynamical cognition textbooks that will prepare undergraduates for reading those more detailed books when they go to graduate school, until now. Not only should all undergraduate psychology majors read Friedenberg’s Dynamical Psychology, I think all undergraduates in every major should read this book.
Michael Spivey
Professor of Cognitive Science
Humanities and Arts, University of California.

Dynamical Psychology is a well written, thoughtfully organized synthesis of a host of findings from the fields of nonlinear dynamics, chaos, complexity and self-organization that demonstrates the relevance of these developing areas of study vis a vis the brain. The goal of the book is the establishment of a broad ideological movement in psychology inspired or based on these findings, a movement similar in scope to the ecological, gestalt or connectionist schools.
Daniel Graham
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Department of Mathematics, Dartmouth College.

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