Complexity synchronization in living matter: a mini review

Abstract

Fractal time series have been argued to be ubiquitous in human physiology and some of the implications of that ubiquity are quite remarkable. One consequence of the omnipresent fractality is complexity synchronization (CS) observed in the interactions among simultaneously recorded physiologic time series discussed herein. This new kind of synchronization has been revealed in the interaction triad of organ-networks (ONs) consisting of the mutually interacting time series generated by the brain (electroencephalograms, EEGs), heart (electrocardiograms, ECGs), and lungs (Respiration). The scaled time series from each member of the triad look nothing like one another and yet they bear a deeply recorded synchronization invisible to the naked eye. The theory of scaling statistics is used to explain the source of the CS observed in the information exchange among these multifractal time series. The multifractal dimension (MFD) of each time series is a measure of the time-dependent complexity of that time series, and it is the matching of the MFD time series that provides the synchronization referred to as CS. The CS is one manifestation of the hypothesis given by a “Law of Multifractal Dimension Synchronization” (LMFDS) which is supported by data. Therefore, the review aspects of this paper are chosen to make the extended range of the LMFDS hypothesis sufficiently reasonable to warrant further empirical testing.