Related papers: A devil's advocate view on 'self-organized' brain …
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Living systems self-organize in ways that conventional physical frameworks-based on forces, energies, and continuous fields-cannot fully capture. Processes like gene regulation and cellular decision-making involve rule-based logic and…
We suggest that ensembles of self-replicating entities such as biological systems naturally evolve into a self-organized critical state in which fluctuations, as well as waiting-times between phase transitions are distributed according to a…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
The mind is a biological phenomenon. Thus, biological principles of organization should also be the principles underlying mental operations. Practopoiesis states that the key for achieving intelligence through adaptation is an arrangement…
The connectivity of individual neurons of large neural networks determine both the steady state activity of the network and its answer to external stimulus. Highly diluted random networks have zero activity. We show that increasing the…
We do not attempt to provide yet another definition of selforganization, but explore the conditions under which we can model a system as self-organizing. These involve the dynamics of entropy, and the purpose, aspects, and description level…
Biological functions rely on ordered structures and intricately controlled collective dynamics. In contrast to systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, order is typically established and sustained in stationary states by continuous dissipation…
Human learning is a complex process in which future behavior is altered via the reorganization of brain activity and connectivity. It remains unknown whether activity and connectivity differentially reorganize during learning, and, if so,…
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…
Adolescence is marked by rapid development of executive function. Mounting evidence suggests that executive function in adults may be driven by dynamic control of neurophysiological processes. Yet, how these dynamics evolve over adolescence…
Information processing in complex systems is often found to be maximally efficient close to critical states associated with phase transitions. It is therefore conceivable that also neural information processing operates close to…
A self-organising model is proposed to explain the criticality in cortical networks deduced from recent observations of neuronal avalanches. Prevailing understanding of self-organised criticality (SOC) dictates that conservation of energy…
For the nervous system to work at all, a delicate balance of excitation and inhibition must be achieved. However, when such a balance is sought by global strategies, only few modes remain balanced close to instability, and all other modes…
The human brain is a complex network of interconnected brain regions organized into functional modules with distinct roles in cognition and behavior. An important question concerns the persistence and stability of these modules over the…
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…
Synchronized oscillations are of critical functional importance in many biological systems. We show that such oscillations can arise without centralized coordination in a disordered system of electrically coupled excitable and passive…
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…
We show that PLDR-LLMs pretrained at self-organized criticality exhibit reasoning at inference time. The characteristics of PLDR-LLM deductive outputs at criticality is similar to second-order phase transitions. At criticality, the…
The "binding problem" of how distributed neural activity unifies into conscious experience has remained an open challenge since its articulation in 1890. We present evidence that conscious integration relies on self-organized criticality…