STUDIES OF NONLINEAR PHENOMENA IN LIFE SCIENCE – serie

This exceptional book is concerned with the application of fractals and chaos, as well as other concepts from nonlinear dynamics to biomedical phenomena. Herein we seek to communicate the excitement being experienced by scientists upon making application of these concepts within the life sciences. Mathematical concepts are introduced using biomedical data sets and the phenomena being explained take precedence over the mathematics.In this new edition what has withstood the test of time has been updated and modernized; speculations that were not borne out have been expunged and the breakthroughs that have occurred in the intervening years are emphasized. The book provides a comprehensive overview of a nascent theory of medicine, including a new chapter on the theory of complex networks as they pertain to medicine.

This book discusses the application of the concepts of fractals and chaos to biomedical phenomena. In particular, it argues against the outdated notion of homeostasis; using biomedical data sets and modern mathematical concepts, the author attempts to convince the reader that life is at least a homeodynamic process with multiple states — each being capable of survival. Although relying heavily on the new mathematical ideas, the author has attempted to make the book self-contained. The mathematics is developed in a biological context and mathematical formulation for its own sake is avoided. In this book, the phenomena to be explained motivate the mathematical development rather than the other way round.

This book discusses the application of the concepts of fractals and chaos to biomedical phenomena. In particular, it argues against the outdated notion of homeostasis; using biomedical data sets and modern mathematical concepts, the author attempts to convince the reader that life is at least a homeodynamic process with multiple states — each being capable of survival. Although relying heavily on the new mathematical ideas, the author has attempted to make the book self-contained. The mathematics is developed in a biological context and mathematical formulation for its own sake is avoided. In this book, the phenomena to be explained motivate the mathematical development rather than the other way round.

A nonsimple (complex) system indicates a mix of crucial and non-crucial events, with very different statistical properties. It is the crucial events that determine the efficiency of information exchange between complex networks. For a large class of nonsimple systems, crucial events determine catastrophic failures - from heart attacks to stock market crashes.This interesting book outlines a data processing technique that separates the effects of the crucial from those of the non-crucial events in nonsimple time series extracted from physical, social and living systems. Adopting an informal conversational style, without sacrificing the clarity necessary to explain, the contents will lead the reader through concepts such as fractals, complexity and randomness, self-organized criticality, fractional-order differential equations of motion, and crucial events, always with an eye to helping to interpret what mathematics usually does in the development of new scientific knowledge.Both researchers and novitiate will find Crucial Events useful in learning more about the science of nonsimplicity.

How do emotions shape who we are? What drives the dance between order and disorder in human relationships? This groundbreaking work unveils the profound science behind human dynamics, where biology meets behavior and complexity creates meaning. Discover how:Drawing from cutting-edge research in molecular biology, neuroscience, and psychology, this book illuminates how our bodies, emotions, and relationships form an intricate living network. For clinical scientists, healthcare professionals, neuroscientists, biophysicists, social researchers, organizational leaders, and anyone intrigued by the science of human connection and change.

The shared platform of the articles collected in this volume is used to advocate a dynamical systems approach to cognition. It is argued that recent developments in cognitive science towards an account of embodiment, together with the general approach of complexity theory and dynamics, have a major impact on behavioral and cognitive science. The book points out that there are two domains that follow naturally from the stance of embodiment: first, coordination dynamics is an established empirical paradigm that is best able to aid the approach; second, the obvious goal-directedness of intelligent action (i.e., intentionality) is nicely addressed in the framework of the dynamical synergetic approach.

Where Medicine Went Wrong explores how the idea of an average value has been misapplied to medical phenomena, distorted understanding and lead to flawed medical decisions. Through new insights into the science of complexity, traditional physiology is replaced with fractal physiology, in which variability is more indicative of health than is an average. The capricious nature of physiological systems is made conceptually manageable by smoothing over fluctuations and thinking in terms of averages. But these variations in such aspects as heart rate, breathing and walking are much more susceptible to the early influence of disease than are averages.It may be useful to quote from the late Stephen Jay Gould's book Full House on the errant nature of averages: “… our culture encodes a strong bias either to neglect or ignore variation. We tend to focus instead on measures of central tendency, and as a result we make some terrible mistakes, often with considerable practical import.” Dr West has quantified this observation and make it useful for the diagnosis of disease.

Connections between genes and molecules, neurons and hormones, thinking and language, people and organizations create a continuous flow of synchronized interactions. These intermingled interactions form dynamical networks across many scales, from molecular, to biological, to cognitive and social. In a sequence of cycles, the reader is guided in this heterogeneous hypernetwork to discover the fields and landscapes of Mind Force. Mind, brain, body and society emerge from the same stream through the complexity of nature: the energy of Mind Force and human attractions.

This book provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the notion of fractal time, starting from scratch with a philosophical and perceptual puzzle. How subjective duration varies, depending on the way we embed current content into contexts, is explained.The complexity of our temporal perspective depends on the number of nestings performed, i.e. on the number of contexts taken into account. This temporal contextualization is described against the background of the notion of fractal time. Our temporal interface, the Now, is portrayed as a fractal structure which arises from the distribution of content and contexts in two dimensions: the length and the depth of time. The leitmotif of the book is the notion of simultaneity, which determines the temporal structure of our interfaces. Recent research results are described which present and discuss a number of distorted temporal perspectives. It is suggested that dynamical diseases arise from unsuccessful nesting attempts, i.e. from failed contextualization. Successful nesting, by contrast, manifests itself in a “win-win handshake” between the observer-participant and his chosen context. The answer as to why a watched kettle never boils has repercussions in many a discipline. It would be of immense interest to anyone who works in the fields of cognitive and complexity sciences, psychology and the neurosciences, social medicine, philosophy and the arts.

This book provides a lens through which modern society is shown to depend on complex networks for its stability. One way to achieve this understanding is through the development of a new kind of science, one that is not explicitly dependent on the traditional disciplines of biology, economics, physics, sociology and so on; a science of networks. This text reviews, in non-mathematical language, what we know about the development of science in the twenty-first century and how that knowledge influences our world. In addition, it distinguishes the two-tiered science of the twentieth century, based on experiment and theory (data and knowledge) from the three-tiered science of experiment, computation and theory (data, information and knowledge) of the twenty-first century in everything from psychophysics to climate change.This book is unique in that it addresses two parallel lines of argument. The first line is general and intended for a lay audience, but one that is scientifically sophisticated, explaining how the paradigm of science has been changed to accommodate the computer and large-scale computation. The second line of argument addresses what some consider the seminal scientific problem of climate change. The authors show how a misunderstanding of the change in the scientific paradigm has led to a misunderstanding of complex phenomena in general, and the causes of global warming in particular.

This invaluable book captures the proceedings of a workshop that brought together a group of distinguished scientists from a variety of disciplines to discuss how networking influences decision making. The individual lectures interconnect psychological testing, the modeling of neuron networks and brain dynamics to the transport of information within and between complex networks. Of particular importance was the introduction of a new principle that governs how complex networks talk to one another — the Principle of Complexity Management (PCM). PCM establishes that the transfer of information from a stimulating complex network to a responding complex network is determined by how the complexity indices of the two networks are related. The response runs the gamut from being independent of the perturbation to being completely dominated by it, depending on the complexity mismatch.

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.

The authors describe mostly in non-technical language the development of a new scientific paradigm based on nonlinear deterministic dynamics and fractal geometry. The concepts from these two mathematical disciplines are interwoven with data from the physical, social and life sciences. In this way rather sophisticated mathematical concepts are made accessible through experimental data from various disciplines, and the formalism is relegated to appendices. It is shown that the complexity of natural and social phenomena invariably lead to inverse power law distributions, both in terms of probabilities and spectra. This book tries to show how to think differently about familiar phenomena, such as why the bell-shape curve ought not to be used in teaching or in the characterization of such complex phenomena as intelligence.

This book represents a selection of papers presented at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, June 24–27, 1995. The book reflects the Society as a whole, consisting of applications of nonlinear methodology in psychophysics, neurophysiology, business and social science as well as applications of the nonlinear paradigm to issues arising in psychotherapy and the study of creativity. Unique are contributions on the use of Boolean networks in the study of psychosis and quality of life. Review articles on the appropriate use of time series methods in psychology and psychophysics provide a valuable reference.

What is the physics of life and why does it matter? The essays in this book probe this question, celebrating modern biology's vibrant dialog with theoretical physics — a scientific adventure in which biological understanding is enriched by physical theory without losing its own inherent traditions and perspectives. The book explores organic complexity and self-organization through research applications to embryology, cell biology, behavioral neuroscience, and evolution. The essays will excite the interest of physics students in thinking about biology's “grand challenges”, in part by means of self-contained introductions to theoretical computer science, symmetry methods in bifurcation theory, and evolutionary games. Seasoned investigators in both the physical and life sciences will also find challenging ideas and applications presented in this volume.This is a Print On Demand title. We no longer stock the original but will recreate a copy for you. While all efforts are made to ensure that quality is the same as the original, there may be differences in some areas of the design and packaging.

What is the physics of life and why does it matter? The essays in this book probe this question, celebrating modern biology's vibrant dialog with theoretical physics — a scientific adventure in which biological understanding is enriched by physical theory without losing its own inherent traditions and perspectives. The book explores organic complexity and self-organization through research applications to embryology, cell biology, behavioral neuroscience, and evolution. The essays will excite the interest of physics students in thinking about biology's “grand challenges”, in part by means of self-contained introductions to theoretical computer science, symmetry methods in bifurcation theory, and evolutionary games. Seasoned investigators in both the physical and life sciences will also find challenging ideas and applications presented in this volume.This is a Print On Demand title. We no longer stock the original but will recreate a copy for you. While all efforts are made to ensure that quality is the same as the original, there may be differences in some areas of the design and packaging.

This book focuses on the successes and difficulties of nonlinear studies, particularly in the areas of Mind Sciences. It atttempts to answer the following questions: is an interdisciplinary contamination of complexity studies in different disciplines useful? Does this contamination originate in a transdisciplinary toolbox of methods and models which is worth calling it “Nonlinear Science”? What are the relations between the metaphoric approach and the mathematical approach in natural sciences and humanities? Complexity in the Life Sciences represents a fundamental workbench for these kinds of problems. The fascinating challenge in these areas is represented by studies on mind functioning.

This book concerns the development of a theory of complex phenomena; using such concepts as fractals; chaos; and fractional derivatives; but; most important; the idea of an allometric control process is developed. In summary the theory attempts to explain why the distribution in the intensity of wars is the same as the relative frequency of the number of words used in languages and the number of species evolved over time from one or a few remote ancestors. The theory also describes the similarity in the variability of the number of births to teens in Texas to the number of sexual partners in homosexual liaisons. The data in both of the aforementioned categories are shown to have long-term memory; and it is this memory that also gives rise to inverse power laws in such physiological phenomena as the interbeat interval distribution of the human heart; the interstride interval distribution in the human gait; and memory in DNA sequences.

This book concerns the development of a theory of complex phenomena; using such concepts as fractals; chaos; and fractional derivatives; but; most important; the idea of an allometric control process is developed. In summary the theory attempts to explain why the distribution in the intensity of wars is the same as the relative frequency of the number of words used in languages and the number of species evolved over time from one or a few remote ancestors. The theory also describes the similarity in the variability of the number of births to teens in Texas to the number of sexual partners in homosexual liaisons. The data in both of the aforementioned categories are shown to have long-term memory; and it is this memory that also gives rise to inverse power laws in such physiological phenomena as the interbeat interval distribution of the human heart; the interstride interval distribution in the human gait; and memory in DNA sequences.

This volume focuses on the modeling of cognition, and brings together contributions from psychologists and researchers in the field of cognitive science. The shared platform of this work is to advocate a dynamical systems approach to cognition. Several aspects of this approach are considered here: chaos theory, artificial intelligence and Alfie models, catastrophe theory and, most importantly, self-organization theory or synergetics. The application of nonlinear systems theory to cognitive science in general, and to cognitive psychology in particular, is a growing field that has gained further momentum thanks to new contributions from the science of robotics. The recent development in cognitive science towards an account of embodiment, together with the general approach of complexity theory and dynamics, will have a major impact on our psychological understanding of reasoning, thinking and behavior.