Related papers: The brain: What is critical about it?
Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns…
An often-overlooked characteristic of the human mind is its propensity to wander. Despite growing interest in the science of mind-wandering, most studies operationalize mind-wandering by its task-unrelated contents, which may be orthogonal…
The human brain is a complex network of interconnected brain regions organized into functional modules with distinct roles in cognition and behavior. An important question concerns the persistence and stability of these modules over the…
The relation between large-scale brain structure and function is an outstanding open problem in neuroscience. We approach this problem by studying the dynamical regime under which realistic spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity emerge…
The brain criticality hypothesis has largely only characterized brain dynamics in terms of their self-similarity, although experimental evidence suggests that the brain exhibits significant multifractality. To understand how multifractality…
A version of the second order phase transition theory, in which the Nernst theorem holds automatically, is proposed. The theory is constructed in terms of the order parameter and the (configurational) entropy. It faithfully reproduces the…
The complexity of neural dynamics stems in part from the complexity of the underlying anatomy. Yet how the organization of white matter architecture constrains how the brain transitions from one cognitive state to another remains unknown.…
In general, the behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary components can not be understood nor extrapolated from the properties of a few components. The brain is a good example of this type of networked systems where some…
This review highlights brain health as a dynamic process shaped by both genetic and environmental influences throughout development. Critical periods provide unique windows of heightened neural plasticity, during which genetic-environmental…
The critical brain hypothesis posits that neural systems operate near a phase transition, optimizing the processing of information. While scale invariance and non-Gaussian dynamics--hallmarks of criticality--have been observed in brain…
Metastable brain dynamics are characterized by abrupt, jump-like modulations so that the neural activity in single trials appears to unfold as a sequence of discrete, quasi-stationary states. Evidence that cortical neural activity unfolds…
The critical state is assumed to be optimal for any computation in recurrent neural networks, because criticality maximizes a number of abstract computational properties. We challenge this assumption by evaluating the performance of a…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
Shedding light onto how biological systems represent, process and store information in noisy environments is a key and challenging goal. A stimulating, though controversial, hypothesis poses that operating in dynamical regimes near the edge…
A rigorous understanding of brain dynamics and function requires a conceptual bridge between multiple levels of organization, including neural spiking and network-level population activity. Mounting evidence suggests that neural networks of…
Deciphering the underpinnings of the dynamical processes leading to information transmission, processing, and storing in the brain is a crucial challenge in neuroscience. An inspiring but speculative theoretical idea is that such dynamics…
Adolescence is marked by rapid development of executive function. Mounting evidence suggests that executive function in adults may be driven by dynamic control of neurophysiological processes. Yet, how these dynamics evolve over adolescence…
The brain is immensely complex, with diverse components and dynamic interactions building upon one another to orchestrate a wide range of functions and behaviors. Understanding patterns of these complex interactions and how they are…
Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…
This paper presents a hypothesis that consciousness is a natural result of neurons that become connected recursively, and work synchronously between short and long term memories. Such neurons demonstrate qubit-like properties, each…