reduction in the dynamical entropy of a system can occur is by reducing the number of its available states. As the repertoire of ways of personal responding, log Q, is reduced, so is the brain system’s entropy, S.
Reality constrained patterns of behavior, as in successfully adaptive personalities, lie in some optimal in-between place between the maximal and minimum measures of entropy. The dynamical state that is postulated to yield in- between-valued entropies is called nonuniform hyperbolicity. This is best seen when the values of the experimental observations are plotted in a two dimensional phase space with each point represented by two values: along the x-axis is plotted the value observed, along the y-axis is graphed the change in the value from the last observation. The signatory motions of these observations plotted in phase space are irregularly varying in rate of expansion (near by initial values are separating in time) and contraction (greatly differing initial values are coming together in time). Values are not fixed, rhythmically varying nor in random motion. These nonuniformly hyperbolic motions are seen in speeded up, talking head videos showing bursts of hand gestures and in normal neuronal activity. Silences have widely varying lengths and bursts of hand movements and neuronal discharges are irregular in duration and character. The statistical pattern of neuronal inter-burst intervals is not the convergent Gaussian distribution of |.Q. or heights but the nonconvergent, long tailed, Levy distribution of flood incidences and, according to Mandelbrot, stock market crashes.
The labored logic and inscrutably compact mathematical formalisms of the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Ilya Prigogine, and his Belgian school, explain the thermodynamics of these long lasting niches of restricted variation in our personal style as energy requiring dissipative structures. Compulsive nail biting, driven promiscuity, readiness to be suspicious are seen as a persistence of deviations from the maximum entropy of formless, flexible, receptive end states. The system is trapped in possibility reduced, energy requiring, samsaric niches of what Prigogine called minimal entropy generation. We unique and oddly shaped and entropy
leaking balloons maintain our characteristic distortions through energy-requiring,
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