Abstract
The human brain may behave as an excitable medium, at least up to a certain degree. Although increasing evidence supports this statement, the experimental basis for investigations in the field is small. However, the spreading depression, a propagating wave of depression of the electrical activity in neural tissue, is a tempting example of self-organisation in the brain and also occurs in the retina as a true part of CNS. There it can be easily investigated and can be used as a tool for studying self-organisation in the brain. We will shortly introduce some of the experimental advances of the retinal model of the CNS and the retinal spreading depression in this article, together with some conclusion from experiments which have been done with it.
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Hanke, W., Goldermann, M., Brand, S., Fernandes de Lima, V.M. (1998). The retinal spreading depression: A model for nonlinear behavior of the brain. In: Parisi, J., Müller, S.C., Zimmermann, W. (eds) A Perspective Look at Nonlinear Media. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 503. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0104966
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0104966
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