Related papers: The brain: What is critical about it?

This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…

Traditional approaches to understanding the brain's resilience to neuropathology have identified neurophysiological variables, often described as brain or cognitive 'reserve,' associated with better outcomes. However, mechanisms of function…

The human cortex is never at rest but in a state of sparse and noisy neural activity that can be detected at broadly diverse resolution scales. It has been conjectured that such a state is best described as a critical dynamical process --…

The human brain achieves its remarkable computational prowess not despite its inherent non-ideal factors noise, heterogeneity, structural irregularities, decentralized plasticity, systematic errors, and chaotic dynamics but precisely…

It is widely accepted that the brain operates near a critical state, characterized by neural avalanches that follow power-law distributions. However, the functional rationale for why neural systems attain criticality remains unclear. Here,…

This explanation of what a brain is and does rests on informational first principles, because information theory, like its parent theory thermodynamics, is mathematically sacrosanct, itself resting on real-valued probability.Just as…

As a promising computational paradigm, occurrence of critical states in artificial and biological neural networks has attracted wide-spread attention. An often-made explicit or implicit assumption is that one single critical state is…

We have numerically studied the trapping problem in a two-dimensional lattice where particles are continuously generated. We have introduced interaction between particles and directionality of their movement. This model presents a critical…

Considering the very large body of knowledge which neuroimaging has put at our fingertips over the last three decades we looked at the brain with a fresh view which could unveil those 'old' things in new ways, in a framework which could…

Neuronal networks alternate between high- and low-activity regimes, known as up and down states. They also display rhythmic patterns essential for perception, memory consolidation, and sensory processing. Despite their importance, the…

The brain is characterized by a strong heterogeneity of inhibitory neurons. We report that spiking neural networks display a resonance to the heterogeneity of inhibitory neurons, with optimal input/output responsiveness occurring for levels…

Humans and animals learn throughout life. Such continual learning is crucial for intelligence. In this chapter, we examine the pivotal role plasticity mechanisms with complex internal synaptic dynamics could play in enabling this ability in…

Many experimental results, both in-vivo and in-vitro, support the idea that the brain cortex operates near a critical point, and at the same time works as a reservoir of precise spatio-temporal patterns. However the mechanism at the basis…

The critical brain hypothesis receives increasing support from recent experimental results. It postulates that the brain is at a critical point between an ordered and a chaotic regime, sometimes referred to as the "edge of chaos." Another…

This paper suggests a statistical framework for describing the relations between the physical and conceptual entities of a brain-like model. Features and concept instances are put into context, where the paper suggests that features may be…

In this review, we describe the singular success of attractor neural network models in describing how the brain maintains persistent activity states for working memory, error-corrects, and integrates noisy cues. We consider the mechanisms…

Highly correlated brain dynamics produces synchronized states with no behavioral value, while weakly correlated dynamics prevents information flow. We discuss the idea put forward by Per Bak that the working brain stays at an intermediate…

The concept of the brain as a critical system is very attractive because systems close to criticality are thought to maximise their dynamic range of information processing and communication. To date, there have been two key experimental…

The relationship between complex, brain oscillations and the dynamics of individual neurons is poorly understood. Here we utilize Maximum Caliber, a dynamical inference principle, to build a minimal, yet general model of the collective…

Recent experimental results based on multi-electrode and imaging techniques have reinvigorated the idea that large neural networks operate near a critical point, between order and disorder. However, evidence for criticality has relied on…