cardiac rhythms

fitznagspir.jpg

I’ve been trying out another simulation of a reaction-diffusion system, this time the FitzHugh-Nagumo model. It models the way waves travel through certain types of ‘excitable media’, especially neurons. As far as I understood it’s supposedly a mechanism like this that is responsible for the repetitive movements of our heart, as the pulses travel through its tissue and are maintained by it. Great things happen when these waves are disturbed, though.

fitznag.jpg

and here a picture of one of the two first instances of this model: a circuit built by J.Nagumo around 1960. It looks like it is 10 by 1 pixels…

nagumo_circuit.jpg