Self-organized bistability and its possible relevance for brain dynamics

Self-organized bistability (SOB) is the counterpart of 'self-organized criticality' (SOC), for systems tuning themselves to the edge of bistability of a discontinuous phase transition, rather than to the critical point of a continuous one. The equations defining the mathematical theory of SOB turn out to bear strong resemblance to a (Landau-Ginzburg) theory recently proposed to analyze the dynamics of the cerebral cortex. This theory describes the neuronal activity of coupled mesoscopic patches of cortex, homeostatically regulated by short-term synaptic plasticity. The theory for cortex dynamics entails, however, some significant differences with respect to SOB, including the lack of a (bulk) conservation law, the absence of a perfect separation of timescales and, the fact that in the former, but not in the second, there is a parameter that controls the overall system state (in blatant contrast with the very idea of self-organization). Here, we scrutinize --by employing a combination of analytical and computational tools-- the analogies and differences between both theories and explore whether in some limit SOB can play an important role to explain the emergence of scale-invariant neuronal avalanches observed empirically in the cortex. We conclude that, actually, in the limit of infinitely slow synaptic-dynamics, the two theories become identical, but the timescales required for the self-organization mechanism to be effective do not seem to be biologically plausible. We discuss the key differences between self-organization mechanisms with/without conservation and with/without infinitely separated timescales. In particular, we introduce the concept of 'self-organized collective oscillations' and scrutinize the implications of our findings in neuroscience, shedding new light into the problems of scale invariance and oscillations in cortical dynamics.