LOOKING FOR CHAOS IN BRAIN-SLICES

Many signals measured from the nervous system exhibit apparently rando m variability that is usually considered to be noise. The development of chaos theory has revealed that such random appearing variability ma y not, in fact, be random, but rather may be deterministic behavior th at can reveal important information about the system's underlying mech anisms. We present some new methods for distinguishing determinism fro m randomness in experimental data, and we apply these methods to popul ation neural responses recorded from hippocampal tissue slices.