Related papers: Brain complexity born out of criticality
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…
Criticality, observed during second-order phase transitions, is an emergent phenomenon. The brain operates near criticality, where complex systems exhibit high correlations. The critical brain hypothesis suggests that the brain becomes an…
This paper addresses the question of the brain's critical dynamics after an injury such as a stroke. It is hypothesized that the healthy brain operates near a phase transition (critical point), which provides optimal conditions for…
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…
A large repertoire of spatiotemporal activity patterns in the brain is the basis for adaptive behaviour. Understanding the mechanism by which the brain's hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses manage to produce such a range…
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…
Cortical neurons exhibit a hierarchy of timescales across brain regions in response to input stimuli, which is thought to be crucial for information processing of different temporal scales. Modeling studies suggest that both intra-regional…
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…
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…
To further advance our understanding of the brain, new concepts and theories are needed. In particular, the ability of the brain to create information flows must be reconciled with its propensity for synchronization and mass action. The…
The observation of critical-like behavior in cortical networks represents a major step forward in elucidating how the brain manages information. Understanding the origin and functionality of critical-like dynamics, as well as their…
Synchronization of brain activity fluctuations is believed to represent communication between spatially distant neural processes. These inter-areal functional interactions develop in the background of a complex network of axonal connections…
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…
Criticality is hypothesized as a physical mechanism underlying efficient transitions between cortical states and remarkable information processing capacities in the brain. While considerable evidence generally supports this hypothesis,…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
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…
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…
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…
The hierarchical organization of the brain is a fundamental structural principle, while brain criticality is a leading hypothesis for its collective dynamics. However, the connection between structure and signatures of criticality remains…
The spontaneous emergence of coherent behavior through synchronization plays a key role in neural function, and its anomalies often lie at the basis of pathologies. Here we employ a parsimonious (mesoscopic) approach to study analytically…