Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

Healthy hearts have relatively high fractal dimensions, reflecting more spiky and ragged EKGs, whereas diseased hearts have low values with relatively smooth EKGs. In fact, those that are most seriously at risk have fractal dimensions close to one with an uncharacteristically smooth EKG. Thus the fractal dimension of the EKG provides a potentially powerful complementary diagnostic tool for quantifying heart disease and health.24 The reason that being healthy and robust equates with greater variance and larger fluctuations, and therefore a larger fractal dimension as in an EKG, is closely related to the resilience of such systems. Being overly rigid and constrained means that there isn’t sufficient flexibility for the necessary adjustments needed to withstand the inevitable small shocks and perturbations to which any system is subjected.