Brain synchronization during sleep

Konstantin L Kouptsov
Wolfram Research Inc.

Irina Topchiy
Harvard University Medical Center

David Rector
School of Veterinary Medicine, Washington State University

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     Last modified: March 30, 2006

Abstract
Understanding temporal structure of EEG signal in brain is important for objective diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders, mental illnesses, schizophrenia or epilepsy. Sleep spindles are most commonly studied EEG oscillatory events occuring mostly in the second stage of quiet sleep. We apply methods of nonlinear dynamics to study such oscillations to develop better digital parsing techniques to identify and extract particular EEG waveforms. This analysis allows us to increase the accuracy of such identification in an unbiased way and obtain additional information about the underlying physiological processes generating such waveforms. In particular, it was found that due to synchronization, the spindle-generating neural circuit becomes a low-dimensional dynamical system with a pronounced one-dimensional nonlinear oscillation, which can be described by a small number of experimentally detectable parameters.