Researchers believe they have discovered a link between the behavior of serial killers and the same mathematical patterns obeyed by sporadic events like earthquakes, avalanches, stock market crashes. You mean it was an equation and not Satan talking to them through a dog that is to blame?
Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury are electrical engineers at UCLA, and they modeled the behavior of Andrei Chikatilo, aka the "Rostov Ripper", who murdered 53 people in Rostov, Russia between 1978 and 1990. Sometimes Chikatilo went years without a killing, other times just days - and the researchers found that the seemingly random spacing of his murders followed a mathematical distribution known as a power law.
When the number of days between Chikatilo's murders was plotted against the number of times he waited that number of days, the results form a near-straight line on a type of graph called a log-log plot, which is the same if you plot the magnitude of earthquakes against the number of times each magnitude has occurred. Simkin and Roychowdhury hypothesize this effect causes epileptics to have seizures or serial killers to commit murder - a simultaneous firing of large number of neurons in the brain.
A single neuron firing in the brain can potentially trigger the firing of thousands of others, each of which can in turn trigger thousands more. This mostly dies down, but sometimes, at time intervals determined by the power law, neuronal activity surpasses a threshold. Following their theory, it would cause the expected result in nature or people. Of course, a study would need to look at larger set of cases to determine whether the data holds or it was merely a chance correlation.
When the number of days between Chikatilo's murders was plotted against the number of times he waited that number of days, the results form a near-straight line on a type of graph called a log-log plot, which is the same if you plot the magnitude of earthquakes against the number of times each magnitude has occurred. Simkin and Roychowdhury hypothesize this effect causes epileptics to have seizures or serial killers to commit murder - a simultaneous firing of large number of neurons in the brain.
A single neuron firing in the brain can potentially trigger the firing of thousands of others, each of which can in turn trigger thousands more. This mostly dies down, but sometimes, at time intervals determined by the power law, neuronal activity surpasses a threshold. Following their theory, it would cause the expected result in nature or people. Of course, a study would need to look at larger set of cases to determine whether the data holds or it was merely a chance correlation.
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