Oscillatory Behavior of Ventilation in Resting Man

Section I discusses the results of analyses conducted on time records of ventilation, for periods up to five hours, for young adult male subjects in a conscious minimal power state. The results imply the following: 1) Temporal patterns of ventilation are characterized by the superposition of a denumerable set of almost periodic sustained oscillations with time dependent and stochastic variations. 2) Different subjects exhibit the same number of deterministic components within similar ranges of frequency. 3) A typical pattern contains cycles with nominal periods on the order of one minute, four, nine, twenty, forty minutes, and two and one-half hours with deviations in period and amplitude due to inherent non-stationarity and random fluctuations, especially at higher frequencies. 4) Resting state ventilation oscillates about the mean with an amplitude on the order of half the mean.