Question:
I attended a colloquium a few years ago on chaos theory, and as I
recall, one of the processes that leads to chaotic behavior of a system is
frequency doubling. I thought at the time that might be related to epilepsy,
but it is all outside my field so I never pursued it. Is this a new idea,
does it have any validity?
Replies:
It is a neat idea, but has not been promising when egg's have
been examined. The egg gives such a range of low frequencies and epilepsy
manifests itself in isolated peaks (caused by many cells firing at the same
time) that the simple chaos ideas do not seem useful. The most promising
ideas are related to percolation theory where the brain losses the ability to
suppress or localize signals and large numbers of cells get involved. The
major treatment is to try to suppress cell responsiveness to signals
originating from sections of the brain. Unfortunately the old methods of
control simply shut the whole person down. The current treatments are
somewhat better.
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