Oscillating brain goes regular before migraine pain hits
Enlarge (credit: Lisa Brewster)
Migraines suck-understatement of the year right there. Migraines are also poorly understood, and it's kind of hard to come up with effective remedies if you don't understand what you are treating.
One way to understand migraines is through physics. The brain is a network of neurons that are constantly talking to each other. This, in physics-speak, is a dynamical system. Dynamical systems can have more than one stable operating point. A horrible consequence of this particular system might be that migraines represent a stable operating point of the brain.
No going backA recent paper-one that isn't especially exciting-has forced me to write about oscillating brains. I've talked about chaotic systems, nonlinear dynamics, and dynamical systems before. I won't repeat everything written previously, but I do want to emphasize the concept of transitions that don't easily reverse.
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