Physics (Internal)

Scale-invariant aspects of physiologic dynamics

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

Abstract:
Physiological systems under neural regulation exhibit erratic fluctuations, which traditionally have been considered as noise and thus, often neglected. However, recent findings indicate that physiologic fluctuations exhibit a temporal scale-invariant structure spanning time scales from seconds to hours, resembling the behavior of nonequilibrium physical systems characterized by power-law long-range correlations and fractal ``$1/f$-type’‘ behavior. We will briefly review scale-invariance as a fundamental concept in modern physics, and we will demonstrate its
usefulness in studying physiologic dynamics on examples from three complex physiologic systems under integrated neural control — cardiac dynamics, locomotion and sleep.