  Turing inspired a computer metaphor of the mind and brain that has been handy
and has spawned decades of empirical investigation, but he did much more and
offered behavioral and cognitive sciences another metaphor--that of the
cascade. The time has come to confront Turing's cascading instability, which
suggests a geometrical framework driven by power laws and can be studied using
multifractal formalism and multiscale probability density function analysis.
Here, we review a rapidly growing body of scientific investigations revealing
signatures of cascade instability and their consequences for a perceiving,
acting, and thinking organism. We review work related to executive functioning
(planning to act), postural control (bodily poise for turning plans into
action), and effortful perception (action to gather information in a single
modality and action to blend multimodal information). We also review findings
on neuronal avalanches in the brain, specifically about neural participation in
body-wide cascades. Turing's cascade instability blends the mind, brain, and
behavior across space and time scales and provides an alternative to the
dominant computer metaphor.
