Related papers: Self-organized criticality in neural network model…
Cortical networks exhibit synchronized activity which often occurs in spontaneous events in the form of spike avalanches. Since synchronization has been causally linked to central aspects of brain function such as selective signal…
Living neuronal networks in dissociated neuronal cultures are widely known for their ability to generate highly robust spatiotemporal activity patterns in various experimental conditions. These include neuronal avalanches satisfying the…
The critical brain hypothesis has emerged as an attractive framework to understand neuronal activity, but it is still widely debated. In this work, we analyze data from a multi-electrodes array in the rat's cortex and we find that power-law…
Power laws in nature are considered to be signatures of complexity. The theory of self-organized criticality (SOC) was proposed to explain their origins. A longstanding principle of SOC is the \emph{separation of timescales} axiom. It…
The sun provides an explosive, heavenly example of self-organized criticality. Sudden bursts of intense radiation emanate from rapid rearrangements of the magnetic field network in the corona. Avalanches are triggered by loops of flux that…
Neuronal avalanche is a spontaneous neuronal activity which obeys a power-law distribution of population event sizes with an exponent of -3/2. It has been observed in the superficial layers of cortex both \emph{in vivo} and \emph{in vitro}.…
Power laws and distributions with heavy tails are common features of many experimentally studied complex systems, like the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and solar flares, or the duration of neuronal avalanches in the brain.…
Motivated by recent experiments in neuroscience which indicate that neuronal avalanches exhibit scale invariant behavior similar to self-organized critical systems, we study the role of noisy (non-conservative) local dynamics on the…
Neurons in the brain are wired into adaptive networks that exhibit a range of collective dynamics. Oscillations, for example, are paradigmatic synchronous patterns of neural activity with a defined temporal scale. Neuronal avalanches, in…
The critical brain hypothesis states that there are information processing advantages for neuronal networks working close to the critical region of a phase transition. If this is true, we must ask how the networks achieve and maintain this…
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…
Empirical evidence of scaling behaviors in neuronal avalanches suggests that neuronal populations in the brain operate near criticality. Departure from scaling in neuronal avalanches has been used as a measure of distance to criticality and…
We study a simple model of spin network evolution motivated by the hypothesis that the emergence of classical space-time from a discrete microscopic dynamics may be a self-organized critical process. Self organized critical systems are…
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…
We study a simple model for a neuron function in a collective brain system. The neural network is composed of uncorrelated random scale-free network for eliminating the degree correlation of dynamical processes. The interaction of neurons…
We introduce two sandpile models which show the same behavior of real sandpiles, that is, an almost self-organized critical behavior for small systems and the dominance of large avalanches as the system size increases. The systems become…
This Thesis explores how tools from Statistical Physics and Information Theory can help us describe and understand complex systems. In the first part, we study the interplay between internal interactions, environmental changes, and…
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…
We discuss mean-field theories for self-organized criticality and the connection with the general theory of branching processes. We point out that the nature of the self-organization is not addressed properly by the previously proposed…
Various functions of a network of excitable units can be enhanced if the network is in the `critical regime', where excitations are, on average, neither damped nor amplified. An important question is how can such networks self-organize to…