2002/08/21 by Stefan Thurner, Christian Windischberger, Thurner, Stefan +5
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Fractal and DNA sequence analysis #Neural Networks and Applications #cond-mat #q-bio
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0208415
12 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2002/08/21 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
Brain metabolism is controlled by complex regulation mechanisms. As part of their nature many complex systems show scaling behavior in their timeseries data. Corresponding scaling exponents can sometimes be used to characterize these systems. Here we present maps of scaling exponents derived from BOLD functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, and show that they reveal activation patterns in the human brain with very high precision. In contrast to standard model-based analysis we use no prior knowledge on the experimental stimulation paradigm for extracting activation patterns from fMRI timeseries. We demonstrate that mental activity is one-to-one related to large fractal exponents, or equivalently, to temporally highly correlated processes.