The brain is autonomously active and possesses an on-going internal dynamics which continues even in the temporary absence of external sensory stimuli. New experimental evidences, and theoretical considerations, indicate that this eigendynamics plays a central role in regulating the overall cognitive processing, a key property which is expected to be true also for prospective artificial cognitive systems, capable of synthetic generalized intelligence.

It is therefore of paramount importance to study possible frameworks for autonomously active cognitive systems. We report here the status of research for an approaches based on transient state dynamics and give an overall view of the embedding of this new paradigm within mainstream approaches in artificial intelligence and systems neuroscience.