  The concept of universality proposes that dynamical systems with the same
power law behaviors are equivalent at large scales. We test this hypothesis on
the Earth's crust and the epileptic brain, and discover that power laws also
govern the distributions of seizure energies and recurrence times. This robust
correspondence is extended over seven statistics, including the direct and
inverse Omori laws. We also verify in an animal seizure model the
earthquake-driven hypothesis that power law statistics co-exist with
characteristic scales, as coupling between constitutive elements increases
towards the synchronization regime. These observations point to the
universality of the dynamics of coupled threshold oscillators for systems even
as diverse as Earth and brain and suggest a general strategy for forecasting
seizures, one of neurosciences' grails.
