John S. Nicolis - Böcker

No detailed description available for "Chaotic Dynamics Applied to Biological Information Processing".

The main aim of these lectures is to tri gger the interest of the restless under­ graduate student of physical, mathematical, engineering, or biological sciences in the new and exciting multidisciplinary area of the evolution of "large-scale" dynamical systems. This text grew out of a synthesis of rather heterogeneous mate­ rial that I presented on various occasions and in different contexts. For example, from lectures given since 1972 to first- and final-year undergraduate and first­ year graduate students at the School of Engineering of the University of Patras and from informal seminars offered to an international group of graduate and post­ doctoral students and faculty members at the University of Stuttgart in the aca­ demic year 1982-1983. Those who search for rigor or even formality in this book are bound to be rather disappointed. My intention is to start from "scratch" if possible, keeping the rea­ soning heuristic and tied as closely as possible to physical intuition; I assume as prerequisites just basic knowledge of (classical) physics (at the level of the Berkeley series or the Feynman lectures), calculus, and some elements of probabil­ ity theory. This does not mean that I intended to write an easy book, but rather to eliminate any difficulty for an eager reader who, in spite of incomplete for­ malistic training, would like to become acquainted with the physical ideas and con­ cepts underlying the evolution and dynamics of complex systems.

This book is the first attempt to give a chaotic dynamics interpretation of processes having to do with category formation and pattern recognition by systems possessing simple hardware e.g. few degrees of freedom. It is multidisciplinary in its approach and would be useful to readers from various fields.

This is the second volume in a series intended to give clear expositions of the applications of the new techniques developed to understand nonlinear phenomena in the life sciences. The first paper by West, Mackey and Chen is methodological in nature and reviews how to distinguish between noise in biomedical data sets and irregularities generated by deterministic dynamical equations. The second paper by Hock, Schöner, Balz, Eastman and Voss addresses the problem of pattern formation and pattern change in the vision system. The authors emphasize the experimental correspondence between quantifiable perceptual phenomena and certain features of nonlinear dynamical systems theory.The paper by Chay focuses on modeling strategies for biological phenomena that manifest strong nonlinear behavior. Biological rhythms and electrical bursting phenomena are discussed in detail, and certain apparently random processes are shown to be describable by chaos. The final paper is an attempt by Nicolis and Katsikas to use nonlinear dynamics systems theory to develop a general theory of linguistics. The concepts of information and pattern recognition are used in concert with that of a dynamic attractor to argue for the general properties of a cognitive processor.