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Neural activity fluctuates over a wide range of timescales within and across brain areas. Experimental observations suggest that diverse neural timescales reflect information in dynamic environments. However, how timescales are defined and…
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…
We present a computational and theoretical model of the neural mechanisms underlying human decision-making. We propose a detailed model of the interaction between brain regions, under a proposer-predictor-actor-critic framework.…
Scaling data and artificial neural networks has transformed AI, driving breakthroughs in language and vision. Whether similar principles apply to modeling brain activity remains unclear. Here we leveraged a dataset of 3.1 million neurons…
A recurrent idea in the study of complex systems is that optimal information processing is to be found near bifurcation points or phase transitions. However, this heuristic hypothesis has few (if any) concrete realizations where a standard…
Driven critical dynamics in quantum phase transitions holds significant theoretical importance, and also practical applications in fast-developing quantum devices. While scaling corrections have been shown to play important roles in fully…
Studies of human decision-making demonstrate that environmental regularities, such as natural image statistics or intentionally nonuniform stimulus probabilities, can be exploited to improve efficiency (termed `efficient-coding').…
Non-equilibrium critical phenomena generally exist in many dynamic systems, like chemical reactions and some driven-dissipative {reactive} particle systems. Here, by using computer simulation and theoretical analysis, we demonstrate the…
An increasing body of evidence suggests that the trial-to-trial variability of spiking activity in the brain is not mere noise, but rather the reflection of a sampling-based encoding scheme for probabilistic computing. Since the precise…
A central challenge in the computational modeling of neural dynamics is the trade-off between accuracy and simplicity. At the level of individual neurons, nonlinear dynamics are both experimentally established and essential for neuronal…
Cell differentiation is an important process in living organisms. Differentiation is mostly based on binary decisions with the progenitor cells choosing between two specific lineages. The differentiation dynamics have both deterministic and…
We study functional activity in the human brain using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and recently developed tools from network science. The data arise from the performance of a simple behavioural motor learning task. Unsupervised…
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…
Adaptive behavior, cognition and emotion are the result of a bewildering variety of brain spatiotemporal activity patterns. An important problem in neuroscience is to understand the mechanism by which the human brain's 100 billion neurons…
Recent experimental and theoretical studies have indicated that the putative criticality of cortical dynamics may corresponds to a synchronization phase transition. The critical dynamics near such a critical point needs further…
We discuss the short-time behavior of the majority vote dynamics on scale-free networks at the critical threshold. We introduce a heterogeneous mean-field theory on the critical short-time behavior of the majority-vote model on scale-free…
Reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling adaptive decision-making in complex and unfamiliar scenarios. In contrast, machine intelligence remains bound to training data, lacking the ability to dynamically refine solutions at…
Many systems in nature are conjectured to exist at a critical point, including the brain and earthquake faults. The primary reason for this conjecture is that the distribution of clusters (avalanches of firing neurons in the brain or…
Recent studies on the complex systems have shown that the synchronization of oscillators including neuronal ones is faster, stronger, and more efficient in the small-world networks than in the regular or the random networks, and many…
In this essay we elaborate on recent evidence demonstrating the presence of a second order phase transition in human brain dynamics and discuss its consequences for theoretical approaches to brain function. We review early evidence of…