No evidence for critical slowing down prior to human epileptic seizures

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate whether generic early warning signals for critical transitions exist that can be applied across diverse systems. The human epileptic brain is often considered as a prototypical system, given the devastating and, at times, even life-threatening nature of the extreme event epileptic seizure. More than three decades of international effort has successfully identified predictors of imminent seizures. However, the suitability of typically applied early warning indicators for critical slowing down, namely, variance and lag-1 autocorrelation, for indexing seizure susceptibility is still controversially discussed. Here, we investigated long-term, multichannel recordings of brain dynamics from 28 subjects with epilepsy. Using a surrogate-based evaluation procedure of sensitivity and specificity of time-resolved estimates of early warning indicators, we found no evidence for critical slowing down prior to 105 epileptic seizures.