Chimera, criticality and cooperation

International Conference on Integrative Biology Summit

August 05-07, 2013 Embassy Suites Las Vegas, NV, USA

Bruce J. West

Accepted Abstracts: J Comput Sci Syst Biol

Abstract :

The three-headed, fire-breathing-part lion, part goat and part serpent-chimera was thought to be an appropriate label for a state that unexpectedly appeared a decade ago in nonlinear dynamic calculations. This new state consists of coexisting coherent and incoherent parts, a theoretical odd-fellow. Chimera states have subsequently been observed in multiple theoretical studies and experiments in systems with finite-range non-local coupling. Our research group has recently discovered a source of such states that does not require the ubiquitous assumption of non-local coupling and instead uses a complex network dynamical model that undergoes phase transitions. This decision making model (DMM) has been previously shown to describe the task- induced neuronal avalanches that occur in the human brain and that relate the inverse power-law distribution of such events to the underlying critical dynamics. The cooperative long-range coupling emerging from the DMM critical dynamics is shown to also give rise to a chimera state. We speculate that such critical dynamics may provide an explanation for the asymmetrically coherent and incoherent brains of dolphins and other sea animals during unihemisphere sleeping.