  We study the effects of nonlocal control of pulse propagation in excitable
media. As a generic example for an excitable medium the FitzHugh-Nagumo model
with diffusion in the activator variable is considered. Nonlocal coupling in
form of an integral term with a spatial kernel is added. We find that the
nonlocal coupling modifies the propagating pulses of the reaction-diffusion
system such that a variety of spatio-temporal patterns are generated including
acceleration, deceleration, suppression, or generation of pulses, multiple
pulses, and blinking pulse trains. It is shown that one can observe these
effects for various choices of the integral kernel and the coupling scheme,
provided that the control strength and spatial extension of the integral kernel
is appropriate. In addition, an analytical procedure is developed to describe
the stability borders of the spatially homogeneous steady state in control
parameter space in dependence on the parameters of the nonlocal coupling.
