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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…
Observations of power laws in neural activity data have raised the intriguing notion that brains may operate in a critical state. One example of this critical state is "avalanche criticality," which has been observed in various systems,…
From 1/f noise to neuronal avalanches, evidence of scaling in brain activity has been increasingly linked to tuning to or near criticality. The concept of scaling is intimately related to the renormalization group (RG), in essence providing…
It has recently been reported that statistical signatures of brain criticality, obtained from distributions of neuronal avalanches, can depend on the cortical state. We revisit these claims with a completely different and independent…
Thermodynamic criticality describes emergent phenomena in a wide variety of complex systems. In the mammalian brain, the complex dynamics that spontaneously emerge from neuronal interactions have been characterized as neuronal avalanches, a…
Neural avalanches are collective firings of neurons that exhibit emergent scale-free behavior. Understanding the nature and distribution of these avalanches is an important element in understanding how the brain functions. We study a model…
Recently, neuronal avalanches have been observed to display oscillations, a phenomenon regarded as the co-existence of a scale-free behaviour (the avalanches close to criticality) and scale-dependent dynamics (the oscillations). Ordinary…
The brain is in a state of perpetual reverberant neural activity, even in the absence of specific tasks or stimuli. Shedding light on the origin and functional significance of such a dynamical state is essential to understanding how the…
Experiments in various neural systems found avalanches: bursts of activity with characteristics typical for critical dynamics. A possible explanation for their occurrence is an underlying network that self-organizes into a critical state.…
Understanding the origin, nature, and functional significance of complex patterns of neural activity, as recorded by diverse electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques, is a central challenge in neuroscience. Such patterns include…
Recent experimental results on spike avalanches measured in the urethane-anesthetized rat cortex have revealed scaling relations that indicate a phase transition at a specific level of cortical firing rate variability. The scaling relations…
As shown recently (arXiv:0801.3056), several types of neuronal complex networks involving non-linear integration-and-fire dynamics exhibit an abrupt activation along their transient regime. Interestingly, such an avalanche of activation has…
Spontaneous brain activity in the absence of external stimuli is not random but contains complex dynamical structures such as neuronal avalanches with power-law duration and size distributions. These experimental observations have been…
The human brain exhibits a complex structure made of scale-free highly connected modules loosely interconnected by weaker links to form a small-world network. These features appear in healthy patients whereas neurological diseases often…
Emulating the neural-like information processing dynamics of the brain provides a time and energy efficient approach for solving complex problems. While the majority of neuromorphic hardware currently developed rely on large arrays of…
In this paper we study a simple model of a purely excitatory neural network that, by construction, operates at a critical point. This model allows us to consider various markers of criticality and illustrate how they should perform in a…
Critical brain hypothesis has been intensively studied both in experimental and theoretical neuroscience over the past two decades. However, some important questions still remain: (i) What is the critical point the brain operates at? (ii)…
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…
Recent experiments on cortical neural networks have revealed the existence of well-defined avalanches of electrical activity. Such avalanches have been claimed to be generically scale-invariant -- i.e. power-law distributed -- with many…
Activity in the brain propagates as waves of firing neurons, namely avalanches. These waves' size and duration distributions have been experimentally shown to display a stable power-law profile, long-range correlations and $1/f^{b}$ power…