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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Physiological systems under neural regulation exhibit erratic fluctuations, which traditionally have been considered as noise and thus, often neglected. However, recent findings indicate that physiologic dynamics are characterized by temporal scale-invariant structures spanning time scales from seconds to hours, nonlinear forms of phase synchronization and self-organized criticality type behavior resembling nonequilibrium physical systems. We will briefly review fundamental concepts in modern physics, and we will demonstrate their usefulness in studying cardiac dynamics, cardio-respiratory coupling and sleep across different physiologic states and conditions.
