English

Neural complexity -- Statistical-mechanical approach of human electroencephalograms

Neurons and Cognition 2023-08-15 v1 Statistical Mechanics Medical Physics

Abstract

The brain is a complex system whose understanding enables potentially deeper approaches to mental phenomena. Dynamics of wide classes of complex systems have been satisfactorily described within qq-statistics, a current generalization of Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) statistics. Here, we study human electroencephalograms of typical human adults (EEG), very specifically their inter-occurrence times across an arbitrarily chosen threshold of the signal (observed, for instance, at the midparietal location in scalp). The distributions of these inter-occurrence times differ from those usually emerging within BG statistical mechanics. They are instead well approached within the qq-statistical theory, based on non-additive entropies characterized by the index qq. The present method points towards a suitable tool for quantitatively accessing brain complexity, thus potentially opening useful studies of the properties of both typical and altered brain physiology.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.03128,
  title  = {Neural complexity -- Statistical-mechanical approach of human electroencephalograms},
  author = {Dimitri Marques Abramov and Constantino Tsallis and Henrique Santos Lima},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.03128},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T09:03:23.787Z