et al. 2010). Given this pair of results, the robust increase in beta power at rest observed in our study may indicate that BP are more responsive to novel stimuli in the environment, an effect that corresponds to recent findings (Minassian et al. 2011). Importantly, that mania symptoms predicted beta power in BP in our study suggests that perhaps these symptoms are driven by erratic oscillations between internal trains of thought and distraction by novel stimuli. This notion of spontaneous fluctuation in attentional allocation is supported by recent findings of increased EEG fractal dimension in mania, which indexes the extent of irregularity of a signal (Bahrami et al. 2005).
