Related papers: Neutral theory and scale-free neural dynamics
The brain keeps its overall dynamics in a corridor of intermediate activity and it has been a long standing question what possible mechanism could achieve this task. Mechanisms from the field of statistical physics have long been suggesting…
Our mysterious brain is believed to operate near a non-equilibrium point and generate critical self-organized avalanches in neuronal activity. Recent experimental evidence has revealed significant heterogeneity in both synaptic input and…
The presence of self-organized criticality in biology is often evidenced by a power-law scaling of event size distributions, which can be measured by linear regression on logarithmic axes. We show here that such a procedure does not…
We propose an analytically tractable neural connectivity model with power-law distributed synaptic strengths. When threshold neurons with biologically plausible number of incoming connections are considered, our model features a continuous…
In this work, we report the preliminary analysis of the electrophysiological behavior of in vitro neuronal networks to identify when the networks are in a critical state based on the size distribution of network-wide avalanches of activity.…
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…
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…
We study a neural network model of interacting stochastic discrete two--state cellular automata on a regular lattice. The system is externally tuned to a critical point which varies with the degree of stochasticity (or the effective…
Dynamical processes exhibiting absorbing states are essential in the modeling of a large variety of situations from material science to epidemiology and social sciences. Such processes exhibit the possibility of avalanching behavior upon…
Self-organized critical states are found in many natural systems, from earthquakes to forest fires, they have also been observed in neural systems, particularly, in neuronal cultures. However, the presence of critical states in the awake…
The statistical analysis of the collective neural activity known as avalanches provides insight into the proper behavior of brains across many species. We consider a neural network model based on the work of Lombardi, Herrmann, De…
We characterize the distributions of size and duration of avalanches propagating in complex networks. By an avalanche we mean the sequence of events initiated by the externally stimulated `excitation' of a network node, which may, with some…
Neural systems process information in a dynamical regime between silence and chaotic dynamics. This has lead to the criticality hypothesis which suggests that neural systems reach such a state by self-organizing towards the critical point…
Directed complex network of two-state model neurons linked by synapses which can be blocked or activated stochastically in time undergoes phase transition between the quiescent phase with zero activity and the active one with persistent…
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…
A major unresolved question in Neuroscience is: What is the origin of the observed scale-invariant correlations in neural activity? Many researchers support the ``criticality hypothesis,'' which proposes that the brain operates near…
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…
Disordered solids respond to quasistatic shear with intermittent avalanches of plastic activity, an example of the crackling noise observed in many nonequilibrium critical systems. The temporal power spectrum of activity within disordered…
Scale invariance is a central organizing principle in physics, underlying phenomena that range from critical behaviour in statistical mechanics to transport and chaos in nonlinear dynamical systems. Here we present a unified and physically…
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…