Fig. 3: Attractor‑based mapping of sleep‑onset dynamics (working theory).
From: Disordered descent into sleep: microstructural divergence across arousal-linked conditions
A Schematic attractor landscapes illustrating candidate regimes of arousal control, arranged by relative top-down executive control (horizontal axis) and bottom-up salience (vertical axis). Normative, anxious-like, depressive-like, slow-switch comorbid and fast-switch comorbid basins are shown as conceptual wells; arrows indicate hypothesised switching tendencies only. B Proposed mapping of clinical groups onto these regimes based on empirically observed onset microstructure. Fibromyalgia is placed towards a salience-biased basin with prolonged early substages and large cumulative deviation from controls. Idiopathic REM sleep behaviour disorder lies nearer an over-constrained attractor with near-normative onset timing and modest right-ward laterality. NREM parasomnia occupies a slow-switch regime with largely canonical sequence structure. Narcolepsy type 1 is aligned with shallow, labile attractors, reflecting compressed onset, higher entropy and increased ordering irregularity. C Transdiagnostic symptom descriptors illustrate how these regimes may relate to clinical phenotypes, without implying diagnostic categories. Attractor mappings are heuristic and not derived from formal model fitting; the figure is intended to guide mechanistic hypotheses linking altered onset tempo, sequence irregularity and hemispheric balance to changes in attractor depth, barrier height and switching dynamics. Z-AUC Z-normalised cumulative area across H4–H10, LI Laterality Index, COI Cumulative Ordering Index, iRBD idiopathic REM sleep behaviour disorder, NREM non-rapid eye movement.
