2001/12/31 by Chung-Chuan Lo, Chung‐Chuan Lo, Luı́s A. Nunes Amaral +7 · 7 citations
Neuroscience · Physics and Astronomy · #Circadian rhythm and melatonin #Neural dynamics and brain function #Sleep and Wakefulness Research #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/epl/i2002-00508-7
Final form with some small corrections. To be published in Europhysics Letters, vol. 57, issue no. 5, 1 March 2002, pp. 625-631
arxiv created 2002/02/13 · openalex publication_date 2002/03/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We study the dynamics of the awakening during the night for healthy subjects and find that the wake and the sleep periods exhibit completely different behavior: the durations of wake periods are characterized by a scale-free power law distribution, while the durations of sleep periods have an exponential distribution with a characteristic time scale. We find that the characteristic time scale of sleep periods changes throughout the night. In contrast, there is no measurable variation in the power law behavior for the durations of wake periods. We develop a stochastic model which agrees with the data and suggests that the difference in the dynamics of sleep and wake states arises from the constraints on the number of microstates in the sleep-wake system.