Related papers: Self-organization toward criticality by synaptic p…
The basic laws of physics are simple, so why is the world complex? The theory of self-organized criticality posits that complex behavior in nature emerges from the dynamics of extended, dissipative systems that evolve through a sequence of…
The idea is advanced that self-organization in complex systems can be treated as decision making (as it is performed by humans) and, vice versa, decision making is nothing but a kind of self-organization in the decision maker nervous…
This paper addresses the question of the brain's critical dynamics after an injury such as a stroke. It is hypothesized that the healthy brain operates near a phase transition (critical point), which provides optimal conditions for…
The observation of critical-like behavior in cortical networks represents a major step forward in elucidating how the brain manages information. Understanding the origin and functionality of critical-like dynamics, as well as their…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Hallmarks of criticality, such as power-laws and scale invariance, have been empirically found in cortical networks and it has been conjectured that operating at criticality entails functional advantages, such as optimal computational…
A minimal model for self-organized critical percolation on directed graphs with activating and de-activating links is studied. Unlike classical self-organized criticality, the variables that determine criticality are separated from the…
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…
The brain forms and stores distributed representations from sparse external input that compete for neuronal resources with already stored memory traces. It is unclear what dynamical properties of neural systems allow formation and…
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…
The idea that information-processing systems operate near criticality to enhance computational performance is supported by scaling signatures in brain activity. However, external signals raise the question of whether this behavior is…
Readiness potential is a widely observed brain activity in several species including crayfish before the spontaneous behavioral initiation. However, it is poorly understood how this spontaneous activity is generated. The hypothesis that…
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…
The dynamics of local cortical networks are irregular, but correlated. Dynamic excitatory--inhibitory balance is a plausible mechanism that generates such irregular activity, but it remains unclear how balance is achieved and maintained in…
We propose that a regulation mechanism based on Hebbian covariance plasticity may cause the brain to operate near criticality. We analyze the effect of such a regulation on the dynamics of a network with excitatory and inhibitory neurons…
The critical brain hypothesis posits that neural systems operate near a phase transition, optimizing the processing of information. While scale invariance and non-Gaussian dynamics--hallmarks of criticality--have been observed in brain…
Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…
In self-organized criticality (SOC) models, as well as in standard phase transitions, criticality is only present for vanishing external fields $h \to 0$. Considering that this is rarely the case for natural systems, such a restriction…
This paper contains an analysis of a simple neural network that exhibits self-organized criticality. Such criticality follows from the combination of a simple neural network with an excitatory feedback loop that generates bistability, in…
The unreduced, universally nonperturbative analysis of arbitrary many-body interaction process reveals the irreducible, purely dynamic source of randomness. It leads to the universal definition of real system complexity (physics/9806002),…