2007/12/23 by Ivan Osorio, Osorio, Ivan, Mark G. Frei +8 · 4 citations
Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #Diet and metabolism studies #Epilepsy research and treatment #FOS: Physical sciences #Geophysics (physics.geo-ph) #physics.bio-ph #physics.geo-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0712.3929
21 pages including 6 figures
arxiv created 2007/12/23 · openalex publication_date 2007/12/23 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The concept of universality proposes that dynamical systems with the same power law behaviors are equivalent at large scales. We test this hypothesis on the Earth's crust and the epileptic brain, and discover that power laws also govern the distributions of seizure energies and recurrence times. This robust correspondence is extended over seven statistics, including the direct and inverse Omori laws. We also verify in an animal seizure model the earthquake-driven hypothesis that power law statistics co-exist with characteristic scales, as coupling between constitutive elements increases towards the synchronization regime. These observations point to the universality of the dynamics of coupled threshold oscillators for systems even as diverse as Earth and brain and suggest a general strategy for forecasting seizures, one of neurosciences' grails.