Related papers: Growing Critical: Self-Organized Criticality in a …
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 observation of apparent power-laws in neuronal systems has led to the suggestion that the brain is at, or close to, a critical state and may be a self-organised critical system. Within the framework of self-organised criticality a…
We show that a network of spiking neurons exhibits robust self-organized criticality if the synaptic efficacies follow realistic dynamics. Deriving analytical expressions for the average coupling strengths and inter-spike intervals, we…
Spontaneous neuronal activity is a ubiquitous feature of cortex. Its spatiotemporal organization reflects past input and modulates future network output. Here we study whether a particular type of spontaneous activity is generated by a…
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 has long been argued that neural networks have to establish and maintain a certain intermediate level of activity in order to keep away from the regimes of chaos and silence. Strong evidence for criticality has been observed in terms of…
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…
Neuronal avalanches are a novel mode of activity in neuronal networks, experimentally found in vitro and in vivo, and exhibit a robust critical behaviour: These avalanches are characterized by a power law distribution for the size and…
In recent years self organised critical neuronal models have provided insights regarding the origin of the experimentally observed avalanching behaviour of neuronal systems. It has been shown that dynamical synapses, as a form of short-term…
Neural avalanches are collective firings of neurons that exhibit emergent scale-free behavior. Understanding the nature and distribution of these avalanches is an important element in understanding how the brain functions. We study a model…
In this paper we study a simple model of a purely excitatory neural network that, by construction, operates at a critical point. This model allows us to consider various markers of criticality and illustrate how they should perform in a…
Complex systems, when poised near a critical point of a phase transition between order and disorder, exhibit a dynamics comprising a scale-free mixture of order and disorder which is universal, i.e. system-independent (1-5). It allows…
An avalanche or cascade occurs when one event causes one or more subsequent events, which in turn may cause further events in a chain reaction. Avalanching dynamics are studied in many disciplines, with a recent focus on average avalanche…
Self-organized criticality (SOC) refers to the ability of complex systems to evolve towards a 2nd-order phase transition at which interactions between system components lead to scale-invariant events beneficial for system performance. For…
As a promising computational paradigm, occurrence of critical states in artificial and biological neural networks has attracted wide-spread attention. An often-made explicit or implicit assumption is that one single critical state is…
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…
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…
Recent experiments on cortical neural networks have revealed the existence of well-defined avalanches of electrical activity. Such avalanches have been claimed to be generically scale-invariant -- i.e. power-law distributed -- with many…
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,…
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…