Experimental evidence for a power law in electroencephalographic -wave dynamics

Abstract:

We perform an experimental study of the time behavior of the -wave events occurring in human electroencepholographic signals. When the subjects have to keep their eyes open, we find that the fraction of the time spent in an -burst of time size exhibits a scaling behavior as a function of . The corresponding exponent is equal to . Furthermore, we show that our experimental result may have a possible explanation within a class of Self-Organized Critical (SOC) models recently proposed by Boettcher and Paczuski. In particular, one of these models, when properly re-interpreted, appears to be consistent both with our experimental result and a physiological description of the possible origin of -wave events.