Oscillators and Alzheimer’s
After having a near-fatal accident falling off his horse, Prussian footman Hans Berger (1873—1941) was surprised to learn that his sister had—being kilometers away—him a telegram to let him know that she sensed he was in grave danger.
Not all jet-lags are the same
The part of the brain that controls the sleeping cycle is made up of two groups of neurons. In order for you to be able to sleep at night, the activity of these neurons needs to be synchronized with the cycle of the sun (e.g. active during the day and inactive at night). When you abruptly change the cycle of the sun (by flying to New York) these two groups need to re-synchronize to the new sun-cycle.
The two community Kuramoto model - Animation
In the interactive simulation in this article, developed by Martijn Gosgens, you can see how the two-community Kuramoto model works.
The two-community Kuramoto model - Mathematical approach
We can represent the interactions between the neurons in the body-clock as a network. In our case the network has two communities, where each community has many edges between the nodes, while there are only few edges between the nodes in different communities.
Synchronization in the body-clock
The body-clock, which is a cluster of neurons in the brain, has the same structure in all mammals, which is remarkable. It consists of two groups: two-communities of neurons that are strongly linked within each community and less strongly linked between the communities.
Quantum synchronization in complex networks
As many phenomena in the classical world have quantum counter part, it raises the question if this is also true for synchronization. As synchronization is a collective phenomenon, it may help gaining a better understanding of how collective phenomena in the classical and quantum world are connected.
Synchronization
Synchronization is a phenomenon which has received a lot of attention in the last few decades. It is the mechanism by which a group of individuals that go through some periodic motion begin moving through the same parts of their cycles at the same time.