Power Laws, Transients, Attractors, and Entropy: Possible Implications for Cardiovascular Dynamics

Abstract

Considerable work has been done to demonstrate that the dynamics of the cardiovascular system is nonlinear. What has not been well recognized is that the system is essentially governed by transients. Conversely, then, if a system component's dynamics become dominated by basins of attraction, pathology may ensue. It is heuristically demonstrated that a critical feature of possible pathology is the relation of the system entropy to component entropy: if a component's (sub) basin of attraction is accompanied by a decrease in entropy, it may become informationally isolated. A method, originally suggested by Eckmann, et al., is proposed which may be able to detect such changes without the need to reconstruct a global attractor.