Figure 6

Shuffled surrogate data and bivariate variation (subject b05). Shuffling RR intervals within successive windows of 50 heartbeats destroyed all deterministic properties of the RR series on the LF-HF time scale while preserving long-term RR variability. The respiratory data remained unchanged. Despite this massive data manipulation the resulting gray-scale map of f₁ (lower diagram) does not change considerably compared to the original data (upper diagram). Only the 7:2 coordination after two o'clock is notably diminished. The course of Δq (black lines), which is per se identical for the original and the surrogate data, may explain this finding. During many periods of apparent coordination with k = 3 and α = 0.03, bivariate signal variation is low. Thus intermittent phase coordination most likely results mainly from a central adjustment of heart rate and respiratory rate but not from real beat-to-beat phase synchronization.