| Summary: | Abstract The brain is a complex system whose understanding enables potentially deeper approaches to mental phenomena. Dynamics of wide classes of complex systems have been satisfactorily described within q-statistics, a current generalization of Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) statistics. Here, we study human electroencephalograms of typical human adults (EEG), very specifically their inter-occurrence times across an arbitrarily chosen threshold of the signal (observed, for instance, at the midparietal location in scalp). The distributions of these inter-occurrence times differ from those usually emerging within BG statistical mechanics. They are instead well approached within the q-statistical theory, based on non-additive entropies characterized by the index q. The present method points towards a suitable tool for quantitatively accessing brain complexity, thus potentially opening useful studies of the properties of both typical and altered brain physiology.
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