Related papers: Everything's Fine
A large repertoire of spatiotemporal activity patterns in the brain is the basis for adaptive behaviour. Understanding the mechanism by which the brain's hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses manage to produce such a range…
Loneliness is detrimental to well-being and is often accompanied by self-reported feelings of not being understood by others. What contributes to such feelings in lonely people? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of 66…
In this paper,we study the individual's optimal retirement time and optimal consumption under habitual persistence. Because the individual feels equally satisfied with a lower habitual level and is more reluctant to change the habitual…
Here we numerically study a model of excitable media, namely, a network with occasionally quiet nodes and connection weights that vary with activity on a short-time scale. Even in the absence of stimuli, this exhibits unstable dynamics,…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
The Health and Retirement Study is a longitudinal study of US adults enrolled at age 50 and older. We were interested in investigating the effect of a sudden large decline in wealth on the cognitive score of subjects. Our analysis was…
This paper considers an optimal life insurance for a householder subject to mortality risk. The household receives a wage income continuously, which is terminated by unexpected (premature) loss of earning power or (planned and intended)…
A tailor-made internet survey experiment provides individuals with information on their income positions to examine their effects on subjective well-being. In the first survey, respondents were asked about their household income and…
Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing…
The majority of common diseases are influenced by multiple genetic and environmental factors such as Cancer. Even though uncovering the main causes of disease is deemed difficult due to the complexity of gene-gene and gene-environment…
Many complex systems exhibit extreme events far more often than expected for a normal distribution. This work examines how self-similar bursts of activity across several orders of magnitude can emerge from first principles in systems that…
Fractional killing in response to drugs is a hallmark of non-genetic cellular heterogeneity. Yet how individual lineages evade drug treatment, as observed in bacteria and cancer cells, is not quantitatively understood. We analyse a…
Where is everybody? This phrase distills the foreboding of what has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox - the disquieting idea that, if extraterrestrial life is probable in the Universe, then why have we not encountered it? This conundrum…
Economists modeled self-control problems in decisions of people with the time-inconsistence preferences model. They argued that the source of self-control problems could be uncertainty and temptation. This paper uses an experimental test…
The exponential family of random graphs has been a topic of continued research interest. Despite the relative simplicity, these models capture a variety of interesting features displayed by large-scale networks and allow us to better…
Dynamical balance of excitation and inhibition is usually invoked to explain the irregular low firing activity observed in the cortex. We propose a robust nonlinear balancing mechanism for a random network of spiking neurons, which works…
We study the statistical physics of a surprising phenomenon arising in large networks of excitable elements in response to noise: while at low noise, solutions remain in the vicinity of the resting state and large-noise solutions show…
Introduction. Increased efforts in neuroscience try to understand mental disorders as brain disorders. In the present study we investigate how common a neuroreductionist inclination is among highly educated people. In particular, we shed…
Advances in mathematical epidemiology have led to a better understanding of the risks posed by epidemic spreading and informed strategies to contain disease spread. However, a challenge that has been overlooked is that, as a disease becomes…
The FKG theorem says that the POSITIVE LATTICE CONDITION, an easily checkable hypothesis which holds for many natural families of events, implies POSITIVE ASSOCIATION, a very useful property. Thus there is a natural and useful theory of…