Intermittent feedback induces attractor selection

Abstract

We present a method for attractor selection in multistable dynamical systems. It involves a feedback term that is active only when the dynamics of the system is in a particular fraction of state space of the attractor. We implement this method first on a simplest symmetric chaotic flow and then on a bistable neuronal system. We find that adding this space-dependent feedback term to the dynamical equations of these systems will drive the dynamics to the desired attractor by annihilating the other. We further demonstrate that the attractor selection due to this feedback term can be used in construction of logic gates, which is one of the practical applications of the proposed method.