On Wed, 21 Aug 2002 20:11:01 -0700 (PDT), Frank Mayhar <frank at exit.com> wrote: >(In fact, chaos appears to be an integral part of brain activity. The most >regular patterns occur only during an epileptic seizure.) Is that surprising? Regular patterns imply low information content - not a characteristic of the alert, functioning brain. But an apparently random signal does not imply chaos. A highly compressed file will appear pretty chaotic until processed in the correct way. Living on the inside, I posit that the randomness does not imply chaos but instead implies our ignorance of the code. (Plus what we measure of brain activity is likely a severe projection of the full activity and thus not subject to more than gross decoding anyway. Going back to the compressed file analogy, someone took the original compressed file, did something like a running average over a thousand bits and gave you the results to look at and try to comprehend ;<) Richard