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The mysterious phenomenon of consciousness, after having been the subject of philosophic attention for few millennia, has drawn much scientific curiosity in recent decades; and many brilliant minds of various areas of sciences are trying to…
Despite differences in brain sizes and cognitive niches among mammals, their cerebral cortices posses many common features and regularities. These regularities have been a subject of experimental investigation in neuroanatomy for the last…
The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)science over recent decades. Here I present a…
The Mind-Body Problem, which constitutes the starting point for a large part of the speculations about consciousness and conscious experience, can be re-stated in an equivalent way, using the `brain duplication' argument described in this…
Dynamic instability in the cytoskeleton underlies a great many vital cellular processes. In neurons, it is thought to play a role in information processing and the establishment of synaptic connections. It is from this interneuronal…
Inferring the presence of critical dynamics from continuous measure- ments is a challenging problem. We solve this problem by showing that continuous narrowband dynamics from a critical system exhibit qualita- tively differing behaviors…
Cortical neurons emit seemingly erratic trains of action potentials or "spikes," and neural network dynamics emerge from the coordinated spiking activity within neural circuits. These rich dynamics manifest themselves in a variety of…
Critical dynamics are assumed to be an attractive mode for normal brain functioning as information processing and computational capabilities are found to be optimized there. Recent experimental observations of neuronal activity patterns…
Diverse cognitive processes set different demands on locally segregated and globally integrated brain activity. However, it remains unclear how resting brains configure their functional organization to balance the demands on network…
Cognitive control researchers aim to describe the processes that support adaptive cognition to achieve specific goals. Control theorists consider how to influence the state of systems to reach certain user-defined goals. In brain networks,…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
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…
Counterfactual Thinking is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. It captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred, or, otherwise,…
Thinking is one of the most interesting mental processes. Its complexity is sometimes simplified and its different manifestations are classified into normal and abnormal, like the delusional and disorganized thought or the creative one. The…
In many stochastic dynamical systems, ordinary chaotic behavior is preceded by a full-dimensional phase that exhibits 1/f-type power-spectra and/or scale-free statistics of (anti)instantons such as neuroavalanches, earthquakes, etc. In…
The hypothesis that living systems can benefit from operating at the vicinity of critical points has gained momentum in recent years. Criticality may confer an optimal balance between exceedingly ordered and too noisy states. We here…
Superintelligence is commonly envisioned as a quantitative extrapolation of human cognitive abilities driven by scale and computational power. Here we show that qualitative transitions in intelligence instead arise as dynamical phase…
Deciphering the underpinnings of the dynamical processes leading to information transmission, processing, and storing in the brain is a crucial challenge in neuroscience. An inspiring but speculative theoretical idea is that such dynamics…
Shedding light onto how biological systems represent, process and store information in noisy environments is a key and challenging goal. A stimulating, though controversial, hypothesis poses that operating in dynamical regimes near the edge…
The brain is an intricately structured organ responsible for the rich emergent dynamics that support the complex cognitive functions we enjoy as humans. With around $10^{11}$ neurons and $10^{15}$ synapses, understanding how the human brain…