Opera Medica et Physiologica

Chaotic Dynamics in Biological Information Processing: Revisiting and Revealing its Logic (a mini-review).

Author Affiliations

Vasileios Basios1*  & Yukio-Pegio Gunji2  

1 Interdisciplinary Centre for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex systems, & Dept. de Physique des Systèmes Complexes et Mécanique Statistique, University of Brussels, Brussels, Belgium;
2 Department of Intermedia Art and Science, School of Fundamental Science and Technology, Waseda University, Ohkubo 3-4-1, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 169-8555 Japan.

 

Corresponding author: 

Vasileios Basios (vbasios@ulb.ac.be)

 

Abstract: 

The role of chaos in biological information processing has been established as an  important breakthrough of nonlinear dynamics, after the early pioneering work of J.S. Nicolis and notably in neuroscience by the work of Walter J. Freeman and co-workers spanning more than three decades.  In this work we revisit the subject and we further focus on novel results that reveal its underlying logical  structure when  faced with the cognition of ambiguous stimuli. We demonstrate, by utilizing a minimal model for apprehension and judgement related to Bayesian updating,  that the fundamental characteristics of a biological processor obey in this case an extended, non-Boolean, logic which is characterized as  a quantum logic. And we realize that in its essence the role of chaos in biological information processing accounts for, and is fully compatible with, the logic of “quantum cognition” in psychology and neuroscience.