Related papers: Emergent complex neural dynamics
In these notes we review emergent phenomena in complex systems, emphasizing ways to identify potential underlying universal mechanisms that generates complexity. The discussion is centered around the emergence of collective behavior in…
When we look at the world around us, we see complex physical systems and emergent phenomena. Emergence occurs when a system is observed to have properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only…
Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…
When viewed at a certain coarse grain, the brain seems a relatively small dynamical system composed by a few dozen interacting areas, performing a number of stereotypical behaviors. It is known that, even relatively small dynamical systems…
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…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
The unique dynamical features of the critical state endow the brain with properties which are fundamental for adaptive behavior. This proposal, put forward with Per Bak several years ago, is now supported by a wide body of empirical…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…
Synaptic plasticity allows cortical circuits to learn new tasks and to adapt to changing environments. How do cortical circuits use plasticity to acquire functions such as decision-making or working memory? Neurons are connected in complex…
The human brain's computational prowess emerges not despite but because of its inherent "non-ideal factors"-noise, heterogeneity, structural irregularities, decentralized plasticity, systemic errors, and chaotic dynamics-challenging…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Adaptive behavior is mainly the result of adaptive brains. We go a step beyond and claim that the brain does not only adapt to its surrounding reality but rather, it builds itself up to constructs its own reality. That is, rather than just…
We all are fascinated by the phenomena of intelligent behavior, as generated both by our own brains and by the brains of other animals. As physicists we would like to understand if there are some general principles that govern the structure…
We review the recent proposal that the most fascinating brain properties are related to the fact that it always stays close to a second order phase transition. In such conditions, the collective of neuronal groups can reliably generate…
Cognitive function requires the coordination of neural activity across many scales, from neurons and circuits to large-scale networks. As such, it is unlikely that an explanatory framework focused upon any single scale will yield a…
We investigate the dynamics of a network consisting of an array of identical cortical units with nearest neighbor interactions under periodic arousal. Each unit consists of two interconnected populations of neurons tuned to a state in which…
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…
In this essay we elaborate on recent evidence demonstrating the presence of a second order phase transition in human brain dynamics and discuss its consequences for theoretical approaches to brain function. We review early evidence of…
Currently we routinely develop a complex neuronal network to explain observed but often paradoxical phenomena based upon biological recordings. Here we present a general approach to demonstrate how to mathematically tackle such a complex…
Advancing our knowledge of how the brain processes information remains a key challenge in neuroscience. This thesis combines three different approaches to the study of the dynamics of neural networks and their encoding representations: a…