Mikhail Rabinovich

Institute for Nonlinear Science

University of California, San Diego

The Dynamical Modeling of Mental Disorders

The brain imaging experiments have showed that the various brain functions are represented by different activity patterns. Such patterns are continuously changing in time and, in fact, it is a movie that can be considered as a sequence of metastable mental states. Each mental state is a result of interaction of emotional, cognitive and perceptional coordinated brain modes. We build the dynamical model of mental activity that describe such interactions. For the creation of the model have been used the general rules or principles i.e. modes competition for the energy and informational recourses, stability to the noise and in the same time the sensitivity to the informative messages, and transitivity of the brain dynamics. The model is demonstrated a spectrum of qualitatively different activity depends of the value of the small number of control parameters. It is possible, based on this, to characterize quantitatively the different normal and pathological mental dynamics. In particular, we showed that dynamic images of the different anxiety disorders i.e. panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder have represented by different dynamical images and different numbers, like Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy.

Video

References

Rabinovich MI, Huerta R, Laurent G (2008) Neuroscience. Transient dynamics for neural processing. Science 321:48-50

 

Rabinovich MI, Huerta R, Varona P, Afraimovich VS (2008) Transient cognitive dynamics, metastability, and decision making. PLoS Comput Biol 4:e1000072