+ - How To Disrupt Spontaneous Synchronicity ->
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mikejuk
mikejuk writes "It may sound like a dry title but new research might lead the way to a "brain pacemaker" that could stop seizures. It can also stop routers bringing down a network by synchronizing and perhaps be a way to disrupt a political meeting.
It is remarkable how easily a group of independent but interacting agents can fall into sync without the need for a single leader.Can the mechanism that brings agents into sync be spoiled by the insertion of just a few contrarian agents who attempt to break time with the rest of the group?
This is a question that has recently received some attention from researchers in the physics department at ETH Honggerber (Switzerland) and Universidade Federal do Ceara (Brazil) and the results are fascinating.
The new work adds a small number of contrarians which change their frequency in the opposite direction from the rest of the group. Two strategies were tested — one involved moving the contrarians away from the overall (global) mean frequency and the other simply moved them away from the frequencies of their neighbors.
What they found was that using global information didn't stop the synchronization but the local information was very effective. With just 5% contrarians needed to disrupt the synchronization.
What this means is that you don't need to stimulate many neurons to stop a seizure and with a small number of people trained to clap out of time you can stop the applause at say a political meeting building to a unified rhythmic climax.
Full paper: arXiv:1207.4401v1"
Link to Original Source
It is remarkable how easily a group of independent but interacting agents can fall into sync without the need for a single leader.Can the mechanism that brings agents into sync be spoiled by the insertion of just a few contrarian agents who attempt to break time with the rest of the group?
This is a question that has recently received some attention from researchers in the physics department at ETH Honggerber (Switzerland) and Universidade Federal do Ceara (Brazil) and the results are fascinating.
The new work adds a small number of contrarians which change their frequency in the opposite direction from the rest of the group. Two strategies were tested — one involved moving the contrarians away from the overall (global) mean frequency and the other simply moved them away from the frequencies of their neighbors.
What they found was that using global information didn't stop the synchronization but the local information was very effective. With just 5% contrarians needed to disrupt the synchronization.
What this means is that you don't need to stimulate many neurons to stop a seizure and with a small number of people trained to clap out of time you can stop the applause at say a political meeting building to a unified rhythmic climax.
Full paper: arXiv:1207.4401v1"
Link to Original Source
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How To Disrupt Spontaneous Synchronicity