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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 Ω, 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 I.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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