222 research outputs found
Cortical response to the natural speech envelope correlates with neuroimaging evidence of cognition in severe brain injury
Recent studies identify severely brain-injured patients with limited or no behavioral responses who successfully perform functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or electroencephalogram (EEG) mental imagery tasks [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Such tasks are cognitively demanding [1]; accordingly, recent studies support that fMRI command following in brain-injured patients associates with preserved cerebral metabolism and preserved sleep-wake EEG [5, 6]. We investigated the use of an EEG response that tracks the natural speech envelope (NSE) of spoken language [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22] in healthy controls and brain-injured patients (vegetative state to emergence from minimally conscious state). As audition is typically preserved after brain injury, auditory paradigms may be preferred in searching for covert cognitive function [23, 24, 25]. NSE measures are obtained by cross-correlating EEG with the NSE. We compared NSE latencies and amplitudes with and without consideration of fMRI assessments. NSE latencies showed significant and progressive delay across diagnostic categories. Patients who could carry out fMRI-based mental imagery tasks showed no statistically significant difference in NSE latencies relative to healthy controls; this subgroup included patients without behavioral command following. The NSE may stratify patients with severe brain injuries and identify those patients demonstrating “cognitive motor dissociation” (CMD) [26] who show only covert evidence of command following utilizing neuroimaging or electrophysiological methods that demand high levels of cognitive function. Thus, the NSE is a passive measure that may provide a useful screening tool to improve detection of covert cognition with fMRI or other methods and improve stratification of patients with disorders of consciousness in research studies
Two and three-dimensional oscillons in nonlinear Faraday resonance
We study 2D and 3D localised oscillating patterns in a simple model system
exhibiting nonlinear Faraday resonance. The corresponding amplitude equation is
shown to have exact soliton solutions which are found to be always unstable in
3D. On the contrary, the 2D solitons are shown to be stable in a certain
parameter range; hence the damping and parametric driving are capable of
suppressing the nonlinear blowup and dispersive decay of solitons in two
dimensions. The negative feedback loop occurs via the enslaving of the
soliton's phase, coupled to the driver, to its amplitude and width.Comment: 4 pages; 1 figur
Dynamical transitions and sliding friction in the two-dimensional Frenkel-Kontorova model
The nonlinear response of an adsorbed layer on a periodic substrate to an
external force is studied via a two dimensional uniaxial Frenkel-Kontorova
model. The nonequlibrium properties of the model are simulated by Brownian
molecular dynamics. Dynamical phase transitions between pinned solid, sliding
commensurate and incommensurate solids and hysteresis effects are found that
are qualitatively similar to the results for a Lennard-Jones model, thus
demonstrating the universal nature of these features.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Emergent global oscillations in heterogeneous excitable media: The example of pancreatic beta cells
Using the standard van der Pol-FitzHugh-Nagumo excitable medium model I
demonstrate a novel generic mechanism, diversity, that provokes the emergence
of global oscillations from individually quiescent elements in heterogeneous
excitable media. This mechanism may be operating in the mammalian pancreas,
where excitable beta cells, quiescent when isolated, are found to oscillate
when coupled despite the absence of a pacemaker region.Comment: See home page http://lec.ugr.es/~julya
Impurity-induced stabilization of solitons in arrays of parametrically driven nonlinear oscillators
Chains of parametrically driven, damped pendula are known to support
soliton-like clusters of in-phase motion which become unstable and seed
spatiotemporal chaos for sufficiently large driving amplitudes. We show that
the pinning of the soliton on a "long" impurity (a longer pendulum) expands
dramatically its stability region whereas "short" defects simply repel solitons
producing effective partition of the chain. We also show that defects may
spontaneously nucleate solitons.Comment: 4 pages in RevTeX; 7 figures in ps forma
Dynamical phase diagram of the dc-driven underdamped Frenkel-Kontorova chain
Multistep dynamical phase transition from the locked to the running state of
atoms in response to a dc external force is studied by MD simulations of the
generalized Frenkel-Kontorova model in the underdamped limit. We show that the
hierarchy of transition recently reported [Braun et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78,
1295 (1997)] strongly depends on the value of the friction constant. A simple
phenomenological explanation for the friction dependence of the various
critical forces separating intermediate regimes is given.Comment: 12 Revtex Pages, 4 EPS figure
A quasi-diagonal approach to the estimation of Lyapunov spectra for spatio-temporal systems from multivariate time series
We describe methods of estimating the entire Lyapunov spectrum of a spatially
extended system from multivariate time-series observations. Provided that the
coupling in the system is short range, the Jacobian has a banded structure and
can be estimated using spatially localised reconstructions in low embedding
dimensions. This circumvents the ``curse of dimensionality'' that prevents the
accurate reconstruction of high-dimensional dynamics from observed time series.
The technique is illustrated using coupled map lattices as prototype models for
spatio-temporal chaos and is found to work even when the coupling is not
strictly local but only exponentially decaying.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX (RevTeX), 13 Postscript figs, to be submitted to
Phys.Rev.
Small-world networks: Evidence for a crossover picture
Watts and Strogatz [Nature 393, 440 (1998)] have recently introduced a model
for disordered networks and reported that, even for very small values of the
disorder in the links, the network behaves as a small-world. Here, we test
the hypothesis that the appearance of small-world behavior is not a
phase-transition but a crossover phenomenon which depends both on the network
size and on the degree of disorder . We propose that the average
distance between any two vertices of the network is a scaling function
of . The crossover size above which the network behaves as a
small-world is shown to scale as with .Comment: 5 pages, 5 postscript figures (1 in color),
Latex/Revtex/multicols/epsf. Accepted for publication in Physical Review
Letter
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