Chaos=Order: Physicists make baffling...( r. Neurons are composed of many e...),Health

Neurons are composed of many elements and are typically nonlinear.

"When you hear your favorite music twice as loud you don't double the pleasure," mused Brandt, explaining how one aspect of the brain hearing is nonlinear.

While other research has shown that disorder can create order, these studies often involved manipulating parameters within the systems such as changing pendulum length. The researchers say that their work is novel because it involves changing externally applied forces. Thus, they believe, their findings might have potential in the real world, where it would be more difficult to change parameters within the system neurons, for example but relatively simple to apply an external forcing.

"This is of course basic research," said Brandt. "But what you can learn from this is that complex systems... sometimes behave in a very unexpected way, completely opposite to your intuition or expectation. It will be interesting to see if the mechanism that we have found can actually be put to some use."

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Contact: Tony Fitzpatrick
tony_fitzpatrick@wustl.edu
314-935-5272
Washington University in St. Louis
4-Apr-2006