Search for crucial events in physiological processes

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to attract the attention of researchers working in the field of physiological processes, towards crucial events. Crucial events are often confused with extreme events thereby generating the misleading impression that their treatment should be based on quantum mechanical formalism. We show that crucial events are invisible and should not be confused with catastrophes. Crucial events are generated by self-organization processes yielding a form of swarm intelligence, and signal their action with fluctuations characterized by anomalous scaling and 1/f spectrum. The existence or the lack of crucial events can be revealed with an entropic method of analysis called the Diffusion Entropy Analysis (DEA). However, anomalous scaling and 1/f spectrum are not a compelling signature of efficient self-organization, and physiological processes with anomalous scaling and 1/f noise spectrum without crucial events are a signature of collapsing physiological organizations. In the case of physiological processes like cancer dynamics, the existence of crucial events is a signal of intelligence that must be destroyed rather than reinforced.