Related papers: Signatures of criticality arise in simple neural p…
The principles of neural encoding and computations are inherently collective and usually involve large populations of interacting neurons with highly correlated activities. While theories of neural function have long recognized the…
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,…
Computation in the brain involves multiple types of neurons, yet the organizing principles for how these neurons work together remain unclear. Information theory has offered explanations for how different types of neurons can optimize the…
At the point of a second order phase transition also termed as a critical point, systems display long range order and their macroscopic behaviors are independent of the microscopic details making up the system. Due to these properties, it…
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…
Random graphs have played an instrumental role in modelling real-world networks arising from the internet topology, social networks, or even protein-interaction networks within cells. Percolation, on the other hand, has been the fundamental…
Recent experimental observations have supported the hypothesis that the cerebral cortex operates in a dynamical regime near criticality, where the neuronal network exhibits a mixture of ordered and disordered patterns. However, A…
The critical state is assumed to be optimal for any computation in recurrent neural networks, because criticality maximizes a number of abstract computational properties. We challenge this assumption by evaluating the performance of a…
Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…
Collective behaviours are frequently observed to self-organise to criticality. Existing proposals to explain these phenomena are fragmented across disciplines and only partially answer the question. This primer compares the underlying,…
Stimulus from the environment that guides behavior and informs decisions is encoded in the firing rates of neural populations. Each neuron in the populations, however, does not spike independently: spike events are correlated from cell to…
The presence of both critical behavior and oscillating patterns in brain dynamics is a very interesting issue. In this paper, we consider a model for a neuron population, where each neuron is modeled by an over-damped rotator. We find that…
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…
Positive correlations in the activity of neurons are widely observed in the brain. Previous studies have shown these correlations to be detrimental to the fidelity of population codes or at best marginally favorable compared to independent…
According to the criticality hypothesis, collective biological systems should operate in a special parameter region, close to so-called critical points, where the collective behavior undergoes a qualitative change between different…
Information processing in the brain is conducted by a concerted action of multiple neural populations. Gaining insights in the organization and dynamics of such populations can best be studied with broadband intracranial recordings of…
Complex systems are typically characterized as an intermediate situation between a complete regular structure and a random system. Brain signals can be studied as a striking example of such systems: cortical states can range from highly…
Criticality has been proposed as a key principle underlying complex behavior in biological and artificial systems; however, how criticality translates from individual dynamics to collective behavior remains unclear. We study this question…
The cluster distributions of different systems are examined to search for signatures of a continuous phase transition. In a system known to possess such a phase transition, both sensitive and insensitive signatures are present; while in…
A recurrent idea in the study of complex systems is that optimal information processing is to be found near bifurcation points or phase transitions. However, this heuristic hypothesis has few (if any) concrete realizations where a standard…