Related papers: Is cortical criticality unique?
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…
It has been postulated that the brain operates in a self-organized critical state that brings multiple benefits, such as optimal sensitivity to input. Thus far, self-organized criticality has typically been depicted as a one-dimensional…
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…
We investigate the synaptic noise as a novel mechanism for creating critical avalanches in the activity of neural networks. We model neurons and chemical synapses by dynamical maps with a uniform noise term in the synaptic coupling. An…
It is frequently hypothesized that cortical networks operate close to a critical point. Advantages of criticality include rich dynamics well-suited for computation and critical slowing down, which may offer a mechanism for dynamic memory.…
Abrupt shifts in ecosystems, brains, markets, and climate are often diagnosed as signs of approaching a tipping point, i.e. a critical bifurcation where stability is lost. Here we reveal a broader and more deceptive mechanism:…
We present experimental and theoretical arguments, at the single neuron level, suggesting that neuronal response fluctuations reflect a process that positions the neuron near a transition point that separates excitable and unexcitable…
The problem of neural coding is to understand how sequences of action potentials (spikes) are related to sensory stimuli, motor outputs, or (ultimately) thoughts and intentions. One clear question is whether the same coding rules are used…
The critical brain hypothesis receives increasing support from recent experimental results. It postulates that the brain is at a critical point between an ordered and a chaotic regime, sometimes referred to as the "edge of chaos." Another…
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,…
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 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…
Brain rhythms contribute to every aspect of brain function. Here, we study critical and resonance phenomena that precede the emergence of brain rhythms. Using an analytical approach and simulations of a cortical circuit model of neural…
Recent observation for scale invariant neural avalanches in the brain have been discussed in details in the scientific literature. We point out, that these results do not necessarily imply that the properties of the underlying neural…
Networks of stochastic spiking neurons are interesting models in the area of Theoretical Neuroscience, presenting both continuous and discontinuous phase transitions. Here we study fully connected networks analytically, numerically and by…
The activity of a neural network is defined by patterns of spiking and silence from the individual neurons. Because spikes are (relatively) sparse, patterns of activity with increasing numbers of spikes are less probable, but with more…
Experiments suggest that cerebral cortex gains several functional advantages by operating in a dynamical regime near the critical point of a phase transition. However, a long-standing criticism of this hypothesis is that critical dynamics…
Motivated by the idea that criticality and universality of phase transitions might play a crucial role in achieving and sustaining learning and intelligent behaviour in biological and artificial networks, we analyse a theoretical and a…
Recent experimental results based on multi-electrode and imaging techniques have reinvigorated the idea that large neural networks operate near a critical point, between order and disorder. However, evidence for criticality has relied on…
Criticality in the cortex emerges from the seemingly random interaction of microscopic components and produces higher cognitive functions at mesoscopic and macroscopic scales. Random graphs and percolation theory provide natural means to…