Related papers: The Critical Brain Hypothesis? Meet The Metastable…
A large repertoire of spatiotemporal activity patterns in the brain is the basis for adaptive behaviour. Understanding the mechanism by which the brain's hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses manage to produce such a range…
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…
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…
Unlike digital computers, the brain exhibits spontaneous activity even during complete rest, despite the evolutionary pressure for energy efficiency. Inspired by the critical brain hypothesis, which proposes that the brain operates…
Self-organized criticality is a well-established phenomenon, where a system dynamically tunes its structure to operate on the verge of a phase transition. Here, we show that the dynamics inside the self-organized critical state are…
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 unique dynamical features of the critical state endow the brain with properties which are fundamental for adaptive behavior. This proposal, put forward with Per Bak several years ago, is now supported by a wide body of empirical…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
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…
Stationarity of the constituents of the body and of its functionalities is a basic requirement for life, being equivalent to survival in first place. Assuming that the resting state activity of the brain serves essential functionalities,…
The relation between large-scale brain structure and function is an outstanding open problem in neuroscience. We approach this problem by studying the dynamical regime under which realistic spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity emerge…
Much evidence seems to suggest cortex operates near a critical point, yet a single set of exponents defining its universality class has not been found. In fact, when critical exponents are estimated from data, they widely differ across…
Thermodynamic criticality describes emergent phenomena in a wide variety of complex systems. In the mammalian brain, the complex dynamics that spontaneously emerge from neuronal interactions have been characterized as neuronal avalanches, a…
Higher brain function relies upon the ability to flexibly integrate information across specialized communities of brain regions, however it is unclear how this mechanism manifests over time. In this study, we use time-resolved network…
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…
Network control theory has recently emerged as a promising approach for understanding brain function and dynamics. By operationalizing notions of control theory for brain networks, it offers a fundamental explanation for how brain dynamics…
The brain may be thought of as a many-body architecture with a spatio-temporal dynamics described by neuronal structures. The oscillatory nature of brain activity allows these structures (nodes) to be described as a set of coupled…
Neural networks with equal excitatory and inhibitory feedback show high computational performance. They operate close to a critical point characterized by the joint activation of large populations of neurons. Yet, in macaque motor cortex we…
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…
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…