Related papers: Memory in neural activity: long-range order withou…
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,…
Many studies have found evidence that the brain operates at a critical point, a processus known as self-organized criticality. A recent paper found remarkable scalings suggestive of criticality in systems as different as neural cultures,…
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…
Cognitive function requires the coordination of neural activity across many scales, from neurons and circuits to large-scale networks. As such, it is unlikely that an explanatory framework focused upon any single scale will yield a…
Scale-free behavior as well as oscillations are frequently observed in the activity of many natural systems. One important example is the cortical tissues of mammalian brain where both phenomena are simultaneously observed. Rhythmic…
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…
Systems that exhibit complex behaviours are often found in a particular dynamical condition, poised between order and disorder. This observation is at the core of the so-called criticality hypothesis, which states that systems in a…
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…
Avalanches of electrochemical activity in brain networks have been empirically reported to obey scale-invariant behavior --characterized by power-law distributions up to some upper cut-off-- both in vitro and in vivo. Elucidating whether…
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…
Criticality is hypothesized as a physical mechanism underlying efficient transitions between cortical states and remarkable information processing capacities in the brain. While considerable evidence generally supports this hypothesis,…
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…
At the point of a second order phase transition also termed as a critical point, systems display long range order and their macroscopic behaviors are independent of the microscopic details making up the system. Due to these properties, it…
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 hierarchical organization of the brain is a fundamental structural principle, while brain criticality is a leading hypothesis for its collective dynamics. However, the connection between structure and signatures of criticality remains…
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…
The advent of novel opto-genetics technology allows the recording of brain activity with a resolution never seen before. The characterisation of these very large data sets offers new challenges as well as unique theory-testing…
We demonstrate, both analytically and numerically, that learning dynamics of neural networks is generically attracted towards a self-organized critical state. The effect can be modeled with quartic interactions between non-trainable…
Highly correlated brain dynamics produces synchronized states with no behavioral value, while weakly correlated dynamics prevent information flow. In between these states, the unique dynamical features of the critical state endow the brain…
The existence of power-law distributions is only a first requirement in the validation of the critical behavior of a system. Long-range spatio-temporal correlations are fundamental for the spontaneous neuronal activity to be the expression…